On Monday, September 19th, I was asked to appear on WDIV Channel 4's Live in the D to cook a recipe from the Healthy Gut Cookbook. Check it out!

So, where were we? Ah yes, the small intestine.

Once the chyme has gotten past the door of the pyloric sphincter it finds itself in the first section of the small intestine, the duodenum. Here’s where it’s very important that things have gone well so far in the digestive process. The chyme is supposed to be acidic enough at this point that it will trigger certain reactions.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have finally arrived at Ground Zero of digestion—-the stomach. Woo-hoo!

I like to think of it as Ground Zero because when most people think about digestion (which I’m sure is almost never because most people aren’t weird Food Nerds like me), the first thing they probably thing about is the stomach. But looking at the whole north-south progression, it’s actually right in the middle, between the brain and the mouth above and the small intestine and large intestine below.

If you were surprised that we started this mysterious process of digestion in the brain, Part Two should put you on more familiar ground. In Part One, we passed the first gate of our north-to-south progression. After your brain has registered the presence of food and your autonomic nervous system has gone it’s merry way down the parasympathetic pathway (or the sympathetic, you poor lamb!), it’s time for the second gateway: the mouth!

In an earlier post, I mentioned that it’s not so much “You Are What You Eat” as it is “You Are What You Digest”. Put it this way: you could be eating the most nutrient-dense, organic, grass-fed, properly prepared and super-awesome diet, but if your digestion isn’t working well most of it is going to pass out of your body without doing you any good, and probably cause you a bunch of problems along the way. Yikes! Digestion is a complicated and finely-tuned system and the world we live in and the food we eat has a tendency to make it worse rather than better. We'll start with how it's supposed to work and then what can go wrong. Mmmmm-kay?