Its a little known fact that between 5 to 28 years old, you can practically abuse your body and it wouldn’t bother you when it comes to digestion. After that ages, especially from around 32 years old onward, you digestive system starts to wear down.
Between 5 and 28, your digestive enzymes, your bile, proteolytic enzymes, and hydrochloric acid are at their highest, and you could mix foods without many consequences.
But as you get older, everything starts to diminish. Sadly, no surprise there.
To understand digestive issues, on has to understand how the digestive system works. Digestion of a meal begins in the mouth, breaking up the food into smaller particles. The mouth also secretes amylase, which is an enzyme that breaks carbohydrate chains into smaller chains.
The nutrients then are transported down the esophagus which mechanically con
tracts to break up the food into smaller particles and move the food into the stomach.
When food reaches the stomach, mainly protein is broken down into chains by pepsin, which is secreted by the stomach cells and acts to break up long proteins into smaller peptides (short chains of amino acids).
Next the food is moved to the small intestine which is where most digestion occurs. When nutrients enter into the small intestine, your pancreas is stimulated to release digestive hormones into the small intestine.
These digestive enzymes include enzymes that hydrolyze proteins such as pepsin, trypsin, chymotrypsin, and exopepsidases, as well as lipase, a hormone that digests lipids, and amylase, which digests carbohydrates.
Single amino acids and monosaccharides (sugar) are then transported to the liver via the portal vein where they may be utilized by the liver for various processes or released into the bloodstream.
Final, the remaining content is moved into the large intestine and mainly water, and some salts and minerals are digested, before waste is excreted.
So how does this link into digestive issues? Well, in an ideal world, the digestion process would work with 100% efficiency, unfortunately this is not the case and there are many disorders, intolerances and allergies that can reduce digestion and so the absorption of nutrients into your body.
This causes many issues, and is what we we will discuss in Part 2!
This is the end of Part 1. Come back for part 2 which then discusses issues that may effect one as you age or indeed before hand if you have particularly sensitive digestive tract.
