Do you suffer with indigestion, burping, bloating, food sensitivities, low iron levels, other nutritional deficiencies, bacterial overgrowth, yeast infections, weak brittle hair, dry skin and splitting or peeling nails, premature aging, low energy, poor sleep patterns?
What do these symptoms have in common? Where do you start to find the cause behind these symptoms? Well, there are various possibilities to consider when hunting for the cause and choosing a course of action to regain equilibrium. Could be you need Hydrochloric acid in the stomach.
Your body does the best it can within the environment you provide for it. The cause for these symptoms could be tracked to one of three key areas. It could be due to long ignored physical damage or overload like muscle strain, poor posture, or an accident causing pain and disability. It could be poor nutritional choices due to busy lifestyle, eating on the run, or picking up take-away-meals on the way home on a regular basis. It could be mental or emotional distress, fretting over mortgage payments, career hiccup, or a relationship breakdown. Problems in any one area of your life will upset the other two primary areas.
Over and Under Production of Stomach Acids
Let me give you some insight on one example of how this list of symptoms could be linked. You could have low stomach acid. Most people think of indigestion being linked to overproduction of digestive acids, but the truth is that it is often the opposite problem. Low hydrochloric acid levels in the stomach will prevent stomach enzymes doing their job, especially splitting proteins into particles called amino acids. These particles are the basic building blocks of all cells and are essential for repair and replacement of worn out cells, and for making important enzymes.
Delivering Minerals Where Needed
Amino acids are also carriers for minerals and without carriers you can easily become mineral deficient. Minerals are electrically charged, being either positive or negative. So is the lining of your small intestine. Now you may be familiar with the concept of two positively charged particles repelling each other and the same repelling result with two negatively charged particles. And you may know that positive and negative particles will stick to each other.
Apply this to what happens in your small intestine. Magnetically, minerals may be repelled by the small intestine linings and never get to the openings to enter the blood stream. Or minerals may be attracted to the linings and stay stuck to them. Either way minerals may not pass through to your blood stream to be delivered to your cells.
This is where amino acids come in. They are carriers of minerals, neutralizing the charge to allow the minerals passage through the small intestine wall openings, into your blood stream, on their way to where they are needed in your body. Protein foods are split by enzymes into amino acids in the stomach, only in the presence of hydrochloric acid, so low stomach acids will prevent enzymes doing their job, resulting in reduced building blocks for repair and poor availability of minerals to provide the spark for action in the body.
High Stomach Acid is Essential Signal to Pancreas
Low stomach acid fails to signal pancreas to produce alkalizing juices and specific enzymes for the next stage of digestion in the duodenum, where protein, fats and carbohydrate digestion is completed for easy assimilation. Thus availability of nutritional components for internal functions is further reduced.
If you are not digesting correctly you are not extracting nutrients from the food you eat to nourish, repair and replace cells in your body. Your body is declining and so is your energy production.
What’s Age Got To Do With It?
By age 35 your stomach’s digestive juice production has already reduced, and by age 50 this is likely to be much lower again, often less than 50% compared with your age 20 levels. So what do many folk do? As digestion slows many people, knowingly or unknowingly, eat more of what is easy and quick and requires less digestion, like carbohydrates and simple sugars.
Trouble is, a sugar hit can lift energy for 20 to 30 minutes, but you can’t repair cells with sugar, so rate of cell wear and tear starts to exceed repair. You are now aging with skin sagging as collagen and elastin is not replaced efficiently – they are made from protein. Muscles will be cannibalized for their protein to keep vital organ cell function supported. Joints unable to replace worn tissues will become painful and swollen.
Does that sound familiar? Check out who is living on toast and jam and a cup of tea. Or breakfast cereal with sugar. There are no cell building materials in those.
Efficient Stomach Function
The stomach must produce hydrochloric acid (Hcl) to dissolve your food and to allow digestive enzymes to do their job of splitting food chains into separate particles for delivery to cells.
Food Allergies
With low hydrochloric acid (Hcl) in the stomach not only are you starving your cells of needed proteins, minerals, vitamins, and essential fats, but partially digested foods that pass through into the blood stream will set off the immune system alarm. These partially digested particles are not recognized as nutrients as they can’t be absorbed into cells, so they are treated as foreign invaders to be destroyed. Now the scene is set for your body to treat food as an enemy. Many food allergies stem from inability to digest food effectively in the first place.
Hydrochloric Acid Destroys Bacteria on Raw Foods
A further problem that stems from low acid in stomach is it does not destroy unfriendly bacteria that is on your salad foods, or eaten with dirty hands or cutlery, or from bacteria laden chopping boards. Your stomach acids are essential to destroy bacteria that comes in with your foods.
Candida
And further still, poor stomach acid sets the scene for wrong ph in your intestinal track. This favours the increase of unfriendly bacteria like candida in your small intestine that then overwhelms your friendly bacteria such as lacto bacillus.
Leaky Gut
All of this leads to “leaky gut syndrome” as the repair of intestinal wall gets further and further behind. Now more and more partially digested food leaks into your blood steam. You are now often bloated, feeling uncomfortable, always tired, can’t think straight and are emotionally touchy.
Joints
Wear and tear of joints can’t be repaired without nutrients so now there is joint inflammation. Skin repair is poor so becomes susceptible to irritation, dryness, flaking and rosacea. Hair becomes brittle. You’re looking older and feeling it too.
Is this story grim enough for you to take note? What can you do to improve digestion?
It takes a lot of energy to digest your food effectively and the catch 22 is that inefficient digestion reduces energy. This can be a spiral down over the years with more and more symptoms building up progressively. You need hydrochloric acid in the stomach to provide essential nutrients for function and building blocks for new cells and for running repairs.
How to improve your hydrochloric acid levels so you can lift energy from food sources and other energy sources I’ll cover in another newsletter.