Proper digestion

I feel that this should had been my first article on nutrition. What’s the point of eating healthy if your body can’t properly extract and use all the nutrients, right? Imagine an engine, you can provide as much expensive fuel as you want, if there are always incomplete burnings you’re just wasting money. In order to better understand this essential process let’s look at the way things should work.

            Everything starts in your mouth by chewing and exposing food to the enzyme ptyalin found in saliva. This enzyme is pH neutral and helps in the breakdown of carbohydrates to simpler sugars. This is why if you extensively chew a carbohydrate, for example bread, it begins to get a little sweater. Next, the food stops in the stomach, which I’m sure is the first thing you think of when you hear the word digestion. In the presence of the gastric acid and other enzymes, such as pepsin, food is further broken down. The acid itself doesn’t participate directly in this process.

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Nutrition basics

Whenever you start learning something new you should always begin with understanding the basics. The same holds true with nutrition. Too many people just search for diets or exercise routines and reproduce them word by word without even thinking if those things are right for them at that certain moment, or even worse, if they work at all. This is the approach used by most fitness magazines which publish endless amounts of diets, or strength exercises. If you think about it, it is pretty clear that they are only interested in selling copies rather than educating people.

Maybe you have heard about the terms we’re going to discuss but you don’t know where exactly to place them in the whole picture. This article is designed to help you put these notions in their proper place.

Everything starts with food. Although food takes a variety of forms, colors or tastes they are all broken down into the same components called nutrients. Generally nutrients can be classified on 2 criteria: depending on the quantities present, or on their importance.

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