HH321: Your Digestive System: 3 Things You May Not Know!

Welcome back to another episode of health hag as I continue this week talking about the importance of looking after your digestive tract and how it is the foundation of your health. So today I want to share with you three things you may not know. The first one is that your microbiome is providing a habitat for trillions of beneficial bacteria and other micro organisms that aid in digestion, and synthesize certain vitamins for instance, Vitamin K and some B vitamins, and supports immune system function. So you actually have about six pounds of living species and over 100 million 100 trillion microbes in your gut all working symbiotically with you in order to optimize your food digestion and your overall health as they work to break down your food. All up you have about 40,000 different species of bacteria, 5 million species of fungi and 300,000 species of parasites. And I find it truly incredible that we have all of those microbes. Working together, we have more of those than we do human DNA in our body, and they are literally living within us symbiotically to allow us and our body the ability to break down our foods. So I think that's pretty cool. Your digestive tract is also serves as a barrier and it protects the body from harmful substances and pathogens ingested with food by maintaining a barrier of epithelial cells and mucus in the GI tract lining and also your stomach acid is a place that will kill off parasites and other pathogens that we don't want inside our body. So when we have good amounts of stomach acid in our body, it helps protect us against those. And when we think that we have too much stomach acid, and we start popping and acids, that actually leaves us open to potentially having some of these pathogens get into our body that we don't want and take up residence and cause health issues down the line. You will note that though and as the bottle says that you should never take it for more than two weeks at a time. Without your doctor's knowledge of that because it isn't designed to be a long term treatment, your body needs to be producing stomach acid. And if you feel that you have too much stomach acid, and you're getting heartburn reach out, because I will help you get to the root cause of that. And it's never that you have too much stomach acid, it's actually that your stress has caused your sphincter at the bottom of your assault esophagus to get floppy. And the little bit of stomach acid that you have is creeping up into the esophagus. And we don't want to be stopping the stomach acid your body needs to be producing that to kill off those pathogens and help break down your food. And lastly, if you tuned in last time, you already know this one. However, if you missed it, the third thing that I want you to know about your digestive tract is that it is housing a significant portion of your immune system 70% In fact, which of course helps protect against infections and maintain gut health and overall health. And so those are the three things that I wanted to share with you today. Because when we understand why something is so important and is and how it functions, we are much more likely to start to potentially take better care of it. And I invite you to definitely take better care of your gut, optimize your gut and you optimize your overall health. As Hippocrates said, all disease starts in the gut and I like to also say all health starts in your gut