Can You Stomach It?

Supporting your digestion with raw foods and supplemental enzymes will help in all food allergies and food intolerance. As I explained earlier, proper digestion is a key factor in eliminating food allergy symptoms. Let’s take a look at the digestive process so you can understand why digestion is so important. Digestion begins in the mouth. When we chew our foods, food particles are mixed with enzymes in the saliva called amylase. Then the partially digested food gets swallowed and enters the stomach. The stomach churns the food and secretes hydrochloric acid to sterilize the food and break it down further.

The stomach relies on enzymes contained in raw foods to help break down the foods we eat. If the food was processed or cooked, it will be devoid of enzymes, so the pancreas and liver have to kick in to produce enzymes to aid the digestion process. After all this takes place, the food (now called chyme) enters the small intestines where it begins the process of being absorbed by tiny protrusions inside the intestines called villi. Sounds good, you say? So what’s the problem? Plenty of things can go wrong along the way, and here are a few:

• If the stomach did not have enough hydrochloric acid available to digest properly,
• If the liver and pancreas couldn’t come up with the right amount of enzymes to properly break down the food, and
• If you didn’t start off your digestive process correctly because you wolfed down your meal, inhibiting the proper amount of amylase enzyme needed to do a complete job, then troubles begin.

This inefficient digestion (caused by improper food and improper eating habits) will leave us vulnerable to undigested food particles passing through to the blood stream. The blood stream is the vehicle the body uses to distribute nutrients to the rest of the body. When food is properly broken down to its correct size, the immune system politely acknowledges it just as a friendly police officer would tip his hat to a lawabiding passerby, and expresses no need for concern.

However, when a big ol’ food particle passes through, and doesn’t fit the profile of a properly digested particle (i.e., law-abiding citizen), the body recognizes it as an invader and sends off the alarms for the immune system (our internal police) to go into attack mode! When the immune system is trying to get rid of foreign invaders, you will usually experience some type of allergy-type symptom. This is what makes it so important to supply the body enzymes with the cooked foods we eat and to chew thoroughly. It not only will help your digestion, but will aid in calming an overly stimulated immune system and will help put your allergies to rest.