While there can be pathological reasons, most digestive problems can be classified as symptoms manifested by the body as a signal that the habitual lifestyle of the person in question is not compatible with normal function or physiology of the body. In other words, there is nothing wrong with the body.  What’s wrong is in the use of the body.

The digestive system is for processing food in order to extract nutrients for energy, for rebuilding and repair and all the functions necessary to sustain life.

Human and mammalian physiology has evolved over millions of year extracting nutrients from available food stuffs in available amounts in the available environment. In other words, whatever was available as food caused the body to create ways to get the nutrition it needed from the food. Since the food remained essentially the same over millions of years, the ways needed to extract the nutrients became more and more efficient and locked in or programmed. As long as humans put the same or similar foodstuffs in the body, the body has no trouble processing it. The problems arise when the food or the frequency of availability changes. Our ancestors evolved during times when food was less available. They were hunter gatherers, who ate what they could kill or find such as
meat, eggs, nuts, seeds, berries and green leafy plants and drank water.

About ten thousand years ago a major change occurred in the type of food available when the agricultural revolution swept the earth. With the invention of grinding wheels, humans could grind grains into flour and make bread. Unground grain is indigestible to the human body. Grains also contain items that are irritating to the human food processing system, cause alarm in the immune system and irritating to other normal physiology. In effect, grains are incompatible with our digestive systems and body as a whole. Because of necessity and cultural habituation, this unfood has become entrenched in most societies and thought of as normal food. It never occurs to most people that anything could be wrong with their bagels and wheat cereal. And yet, grains cause loss of minerals, interfere with protein digestion, depress the thyroid gland and cause autoimmune disease.

So a major cause of digestive problems such as reflux, heartburn and irritable bowel disease is simply the eating of grains. The body is OK, the grains aren’t!

In the last 50 years or so the food industry has chemically altered food to make it last longer so they could ship it longer distances. They added preservatives, coloring, changed the fat and more. This processed food is not recognized by our bodies. Once in the stomach, the body tries to digest it with mixed results and many side-effects or physical symptoms such as pain and intestinal gas.

Another category is food combinations. That meat and potatoe combination so common to the western table is so foreign to the human stomach. The body digests things better when eaten separately. Proteins and carbohydrates or sugar is a very poor combination and results in the rotting of the protein right in the stomach and small intestines.  That means proteins and fruit is a poor combination since fruit is mostly sugar.

The other problem is eating too frequently or eating too much or for too long.  The body needs time to process food preferably 4-5 hours between meals. Eating a meal and eating dessert 30 minutes later is a digestive disaster. To the partially digested food is added a new meal, which starts things over again causing partial digestion of both meals leading to too much acid, heartburn, pain and gas.

So we can see that most digestive concerns are a function of expecting the body to process food in a manner that it is incapable of doing. The symptoms are a signal to the user that the user is at fault. Not the body.

Dr Robert Jackson, May 2006