How Traditional Chinese Medicine Improves Digestion
By Kathlene Emond, LAc
I
magine you are about to cook something. Assuming you have already prepped your ingredients, what is the first thing you do? You turn on the stove. Fire is a necessary component of cooking. Likewise, from a Chinese medicine perspective, fire is needed in the body in order to properly break down the foods we eat in order to utilize the nutrients they contain. Before we are born, we receive all the nutrients we need to sustain us through the umbilical cord. Once that cord is severed, our digestive system becomes fully responsible for manufacturing all the qi/energy and blood we will need each day for the rest of our lives. Having a strong Earth element/digestive system is the foundation to leading productive, optimal lives. It is so fundamental, there is even a school—called the Earth school—dedicated to it. The Earth school views all disease processes as having their original root cause in digestive dysfunction. How Does Chinese Medicine View Digestion? There are several main organs involved in digestion. The pathway begins at the mouth, where mechanical and some early chemical breakdown of food creates a bolus. Digestion of simple carbohydrates is first on the to-do list, with salivary amylase beginning its enzymatic process as soon as food enters the mouth. Then, travel20
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ing down the length of the esophagus, the bolus enters the stomach where it encounters hydrochloric acid and more mechanical breakdown. The spleen/pancreas (in the Chinese medicine view, the pancreas is part of spleen), liver, and gallbladder provide enzymes and bile, respectively, to continue breaking down key components such as proteins and fats. The vagus nerve then signals the stomach to begin contracting in order to move what is now called chyme into the small intestine, where most of the absorption of the broken-down nutrients occurs. The small intestine is said to “separate the clear from the turbid”—what serves us is taken in, and what we do not need gets shuffled off to the large intestine. It is here that fermentation occurs, and excess water is reabsorbed from the forming stool. Finally, the stool moves into the rectum and is expelled once the rectum is full and stretch receptors send the signal that it is time to contract. Proper digestion, like everything, involves a dynamic and delicate balance of yin and yang. Fire is considered yang in Chinese medicine. After our food has been sufficiently broken down and there is no further need for yang, the stomach yin (which Western medicine would call probiotics) tempers the yang back to its appropriate base level until the next time we eat. This would be equivalent to turning the burner off, something we often worry we didn’t do, and for good reason!
