Digesting begins with chewing your food. Food allergies, malnutrition, and gut problems can sometimes be corrected with simple measures.
If you see undigested food in your bowel movement there are several things it indicates. First, food that can be identified in a bowel movement means you need to slow down and chew your food better. Every thing you eat should be chewed to a mush before you swallow.
Chewing well obviously breaks the cellular structure of the food, thereby helping you absorb more of the nutrients in the food. It also gives time for enzymes in your saliva to mix into the food and start breaking the food down even more. Seeing food in the BM always means you didn’t chew well. One of the major things see are seeds, beans, carrots, and corn.
When viewed through a microscope, the cellular structure of vegetables look like tiny capsules. The cellular capsules are made from cellulose. Unfortunately, humans don’t have the ability to produce cellulase, the enzyme necessary to breakdown cellulose, which is why we must chew it well in order to get to the nutrients inside the vegetable cells. This is also one of the big selling points to “masticating” juicers, such as the Champion Juicer.
The only other way we can normally get to the nutrients inside the vegetables is to cook them first.
Cooking breaks down the cellulose to some degree. I come from the south, so vegetables were often cooked for a long time. Steaming is really all that is necessary to help breakdown the cellulose capsules to give your body the nutrients contained inside the cell.
Other possible reason you would see undigested food in your BM is that you have low amounts of hydrochloric acid in your stomach. Low HCl can either be a problem in the acid-producing cells in your stomach, in which case you would need the help of your doctor to determine what is going on.
Another reason of low HCl might be as simple as the fact that you are drinking too much water and other drinks during your meal. Drinking during the meal dilutes the stomach acid. Water normally has a pH of 7 while HCl has a pH of 1. The stomach can only dissolve the food you eat if the acid is strong.
Another problem with poor digesting is what time of day you are eating the most protein. You biggest protein-rich meal of the day should be eaten at mid-day, due to the fact that the stomach acid is highest earlier in the day. If you have low stomach acid you can take products, such as Hypo-D by NutriWest company. There are many good over-the-counter products that contain the same basic ingredients, such as Betaine HCl to increase the HCl levels for those people whose body struggles to make HCl.
If you have had your gallbladder removed then you will always need to supplement with Ox Bile extract. Bile is a fat emulsifier, meaning it breaks down the fats from your foods into smaller, more usable pieces. The role of the gallbladder is to hold the liquid bile from your liver so that there is enough available when you eat fatty foods and foods rich in essential fatty acids. Without enough bile you cannot access the fatty acids you need for optimum health. This is included with in the Hypo-D remedy and is often available in the HCl formulations in health food stores.
If you are spending a lot for the best quality, hopefully organic food, then it would behoove you to actually be getting the full nutritional benefit when you eat it! So, for better digestion and absorption of the food slow down and chew your food well. Don’t drink so much during the meal, and supplement with digestive enzymes and Hypo-D or similar products if your body has sluggish digestion.