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Chapter 7 World’s Healthiest Foods Promote Digestive Health
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The World’s Healthiest Foods provide our digestive system with the health-promoting nutrients it needs to function at its best. This is not only important to overall health but to successful weight loss as well.
In order to achieve healthy weight loss, it is necessary to maintain metabolic supplies of energy to our brain, muscles, and other organ systems. This “metabolic maintenance” can only be achieved when the digestive tract is working properly. Your digestive tract is the place where everything starts.
The digestive process begins when you chew your food. It’s important to adequately chew in order to break the food down into small enough pieces to allow for the best digestion. I think that the more you chew, the more weight you can lose. Unless you can break down your food effectively, nutrients will not be made available for absorption up into your body. And if you cannot absorb the nutrients, they cannot provide benefits to the rest of your body. It’s absolutely essential for you to digest food and absorb nutrients in an optimal way if you want to achieve healthy weight loss.
As I will present in Chapter 10, inflammatory balance in the body may be especially important to maintain during times of weight loss. One way to maintain this balance is to make sure your digestive tract is functioning optimally. That’s because if there is any compromise in your digestion, unwanted molecules (like toxic residues or allergycausing substances) can sometimes get absorbed into the blood stream and trigger unwanted inflammatory responses.
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CLICK HERE : Know How This Person Lost 2 Kg In Just One Week
Healthy Weight Loss— Without Dieting
While all nutrients are important to maintaining digestive health, following are a few of the health-promoting nutrients found in the World’s Healthiest Foods that have been singled out for their special contribution.
Dietary Fiber At the top of many lists for digestive tract support is dietary fiber. Your food simply cannot pass through you in an optimal way unless it contains fiber. Ideally, we should have at least 10 grams of fiber with every meal and at least 5 grams with every snack, although 20 grams per meal and 10 grams per snack would also be helpful to most of our digestive tracts. Whole, unprocessed foods are essential for adequate fiber. Of special importance are World’s Healthiest Foods such as vegetables, legumes (like beans or lentils) and whole grains. The skins of fruit are also rich in fiber. Fiber helps keep food moving through our intestines at a gradual pace—not too fast and not too slow.
Glutamine Although not as well known in the conventional world of nutrition, glutamine is an amino acid that serves as one of the primary fuels for cells that line our small intestine. It can be made from other amino acids found in food or in our body, but it is also found preformed in a variety of World’s Healthiest Foods, including cabbage, beets, beef, chicken, fish, beans, and dairy products.
Short Chain Fatty Acids Like glutamine, short chain fatty acids (or SCFAs) are not wellknown in the conventional world of nutrition, but these key nutrients serve as preferred fuels for cells that line our large intestine. If these cells do not have adequate energy, they cannot process our food properly. SCFAs are formed by bacteria in our small intestine when these bacteria process starches (especially resistant starches) and several other types of carbohydrate-related molecules found in our food. World’s Healthiest Foods such as whole grains like corn, oats, wheat, rye, and brown rice; fruits such as apples and citrus fruits;
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CLICK HERE : Know How This Person Lost 2 Kg In Just One Week
World’s Healthiest Foods Promote Digestive Health
and all legumes are good sources of resistant starch and non-starch carbohydrates that our intestinal bacteria can convert into SCFAs.
Other Digestive-Health Nutrients
The process of digestion and absorption is a complicated one that involves dozens of different cell types, dozens of different enzymes, the movement of smooth muscles around our intestines, and the trigger of these muscles by our nerves. It’s literally impossible to name a single vitamin or mineral that does not play a role either directly or indirectly in some aspect of digestive health. For this reason, foods with the greatest concentration of nutrients and greatest variety of nutrients are optimal for digestive support. The World’s Healthiest Foods fit this description exactly because they have all been chosen on the basis of nutrient-richness. They provide our digestive tract with all of necessary nutrients, while at the same time avoiding putting pressure on the digestive tract to work unduly hard.
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