Podcast 542: This Digestive Myth Is Ruining Your Gut Health!

SCOTT: You've probably heard that digestion starts in the stomach, but that's one of the biggest misinformation, disinformation lies in modern medical or health advice. Today, we're going to bust that myth wide open, explain what's really going on in your gut and why it matters more than you think. Right after this. 

Welcome everybody. This is the Life Enthusiast Health Shots podcast. Restoring vitality to you and the planet. I'm your host Scott Paton. Joining us as usual is health engineer Martin Pytela. Hey Martin, how are you doing today?

MARTIN: Engineering my life away. Scott, it's all right. Thank you for asking.

SCOTT: Awesome. All right, so we're going to be talking about digestion and that's something that everybody needs to be concerned about because it just is a huge problem. And if you're not healthy, are you getting the nutrients your body needs to repair yourself? Whatever the problems are. And one of the things I want to just quickly mention is, if you think antacids help when you have heartburn, you're just making matters worse. So with that, Martin, where does digestion start?

MARTIN: Well, obviously, you start right here at the mouth, right?

SCOTT: It's not obvious to most of us. I remember once I was eating with, and I don't know, 20 years old, 15 years old, somewhere in there, with my uncle, and I took the fork and I'll use the pen as the fork, and I put it in front of my mouth and I just sucked the food in and right down the and my uncle said, "You didn't even, you didn't even put it in your mouth. It just went in like a vacuum cleaner." And I think that's what happens with so many of us, right? We don't think about our eating habits.

MARTIN: What's interesting there is this enzyme called ptyalin that is inserted in the mouth, and also amylase is inserted in your saliva. And what's interesting is that the digestion really starts with mixing the food with the saliva, and especially important is that the carbohydrates are digested by amylase, which is indeed injected in the mouth, right? The old school rule, I don't know if your mom told you, was that every mouthful should be chewed 20 times.

SCOTT: I've heard that. And I'd be lucky if I hit five.

MARTIN: Which is a lot. When you really are supposed to go 20, you'll, by the time I hit 10, I'm thinking, "Oh, it's time to swallow." And I'm having to double down on it.

SCOTT: Right. And we missed you last week, George. Good to see you joining us again.

MARTIN: Hey, hey, Scott. George. 

SCOTT: Nice to have you with us.

SCOTT: All right, so it starts in the mouth.

MARTIN: Right. So, number one, particle size reduction, right? Our digestive system extracts nutrients only at the surface level of the particle. So if you swallow something the size of golf balls, you will only be extracting from the surface of the golf ball, and the entire inside of it will be untouched. So if you swallow the size of peas, green peas, then it's going to be smaller. And if you chew it properly and completely turn it into a very fine mush, you will have a much greater chance of extracting nutrients from whatever you put into your mouth. You're muted, Scott.

SCOTT: Sorry. The other thing I really wanted to quickly talk about was the brain, because we often talk about the mouth, but our brain is a whole part of that too, because you've got the smelling and the thinking about your foods. One of the things that I always forget now, but when I was a kid we always did was pray before we ate. And a lot of times people will, they have, well, even before that, I know some people who are amazing cooks and I've asked them, “how do you cook so well?” They go, “I cook with love.” And I go like, what do you mean? Well, when I'm cooking, I am directing my love into the food so we have this whole spiritual aspect on the physical that we don't really think about. So if you have if you're eating so I want you to comment on this Martin. If you're eating food that is prepared by people who are angry, stressed, mad, what is that going to do?

MARTIN: Well, we go right back to the beginning. The vibrational quality of water. And our food is mostly water, or at least largely water. It appears solid, but it's rich in water. And we all, we talked about this many times in other places that water remembers the vibration with which it interacts. And so when you put happy thoughts into the hamburger, it's going to reverberate through you in a happy, loving way. Of course, you're a disinterested semi-stoned pimply-faced teenager. You're going to produce food that's kind of disinterested and borderline, and it will taste like that too.

SCOTT: Right. And for those of you that are curious and want to know more about it, what was the name of the Japanese professor that did all those water experiments?

MARTIN: Masaru Emoto.

SCOTT: Masaru Emoto.

MARTIN: Anyway, he put out pictures of snowflakes or as ice flakes that as water crystallizes, it will crystallize in six-directional, multi-dimensional structures. And water that's harmonized or happy will produce harmonious structures. Whereas water,

SCOTT: Equal harmonious structures.

MARTIN: Yeah, visually pleasing. Whereas the abused water will create deformed things altogether.

SCOTT: It looks like sludge.

MARTIN: Yeah. Or that instead of having pretty tendrils and legs extending in equal ways in all six directions, they will be stunted in some ways, like right only one leg or no legs or whatever. SCOTT: So we often come back to the same thing. Water is extremely important. We're 80, 90% water. The food is predominantly water. And water is incredibly influenced by your thoughts, by your emotions, by your feelings. And it's something that I'm super guilty about. We're talking about this, and I think, “Well, I know this, and I don't do this. I should really be doing this.” When you're preparing your food, what are you thinking about? What's going on in your mind when you're eating, before you eat? Are you grateful? That's such an important part of our health. And then when you're actually eating, are you well, first of all, are you putting love into the whole process? And then do you take a moment and I do this so rarely, Martin, just put your head down and contemplate for a bit and smell it. Right.

MARTIN: Oh, you mean get your nose in it?

SCOTT: Get your nose in it and smell it. It's just like, wow. And appreciate all the things from the farmer who planted the seeds or raised the cattle to the person that transported it.

MARTIN: The gratitude part and that whole process, right? There's one other thing you can do, which is to radiate. I don't know if you understand Reiki. I'm sure you do, but the audience, Reiki is the Japanese concept of channeling the cosmic life force, or the life force energy, and it comes through us. It's out there, and it comes through us, and we can radiate it through our hands. And many different religions have these prayer gestures. Some go like this with their hands, and some go like this, and some go like this, and some go like this. (Uses hand gestures to demonstrate) But the whole idea is to be aware of the fact that energy will pass through you and out of through your hands. And so the Reiki would have their hands out something like this toward the food and then also make this circular gesture of starting from out there and spiraling towards the center, generating the energy. Anyway, that's what I'm remembering, one of my Reiki master friends who would do this with his food. As he sat down, the first thing he would do, he would radiate his food with his life force. Tada, right?

SCOTT: It really is an amazing thing, and it's lost because nobody really talks about this. And so you talked about how it starts in the mouth, right? I'm going to suggest that it starts a little bit before and after all this thinking and emotional stuff that we just talked about. There's another step, and that is when you're thinking, or you're smelling that food, what are you really doing? What you're doing is you're telling your body, food's on its way. Get ready. Right? So in Hawaii, they always stop. The Hawaiians would always stop, take a breath, and then they would do something. And it drove the British colonial masters crazy because they just saw these guys standing around. They didn't know that they were preparing for work. And that's one of the reasons that they called the white man whatever the word is, it meant non-breather. 

So this preparation, it also is what happens with us because if you just go and, oh there's some food and you just take and stick it in your mouth, your mouth is not prepared. But when you take that moment, and you smell it, and you get ready, your brain is triggered by the smells and it says, "Oh, like start creating the enzymes and whatever you need to have in your mouth, saliva and everything else. Pavlov’s dogs, right? Ring a bell, saliva, we need to make sure that our mouth knows “Hey, food's coming. Get ready." And it's going to start creating the saliva and the enzymes that we need. 

MARTIN: There's more to it because of course, as your brain analyzes the input, both the smelling and the tasting it actually is adjusting the enzymes and whatever else is going to take place, you're responding. It's a two-way street.

SCOTT: So that's important. So Patty has a question. 

MARTIN: Can you pop it one more time?

SCOTT: It says liver issues, pain and inflammation all over the body and dry skin. 

MARTIN: Now, so that's a stack of stuff just gone big, right? When you end up with dry skin, is it your thyroid not working well enough? Most thyroid dominant people will have dry skin, especially dry, cracked heels, especially in winter. So, if that's,

SCOTT: I have that.

MARTIN: If that's your story, you're probably the thyroid dominant person who's not ingesting enough iodine as they go and who's not putting enough coconut oil on their poor dry feet.

SCOTT: Guilty as charged, your honor.

MARTIN: So, that’s that, right? So, now this pain and inflammation, well, that's a generic problem, right? Pain is one of the symptoms of inflammation. There is redness, heat, swelling, pain, and loss of function. Those are the five symptoms of inflammation. And the inflammation's really a symptom of the immune system trying to repair something. So when something is broken, inflammation is the tool with which we're trying to fix it. Well, you probably have a leaky gut going, I would imagine, which of course most people of the thyroid type don't do great with grains, especially the miserably modified grains of the industrial age. So, if you can get your hands on some old school Italian pasta, you might be able to survive it. But if you buy the American grain and then convert it into either bread or noodles or whatever, you probably will not do well on that.

SCOTT: Right. And she has a second comment, which is what about hydrogen oxygen therapy through the nose? And before you answer, before you answer, let me jump in with this: sounds like a magic bullet. It might help, it might not help, but the fact of the matter is we're toxic. We're malnourished, stagnant, and like what you had said before, we have,

MARTIN: Let's close the loop on the first question which is, what you're putting in your mouth will affect the health of your gut, and you need to have the proper microbial terrain within it. It's possible that you have dysbiosis, leaky gut, which means you need more dirt, probably in the form of Fulvic and Humic Acid, and more oligosaccharides, which will be the soluble and insoluble fibers in your food to help and create a terrain that's healthier.

And then the next subsequent was liver issues, which is a blood supply that goes straight from the small intestine to the liver. So whatever the small intestine doesn't cope with gets downloaded to the liver to cope with, which it may not. And so again, many of us who overdo the carbohydrates end up with a liver disease that is labeled NAFLD, which is non alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is fatty liver, as in the liver is overloaded with so much of starch that it's starting to not cope with the inputs.

SCOTT: Or could we say it a different way, Martin? Could we say you're poisoning your liver? You're overloading it with toxins and things that make it very,

MARTIN: Not necessarily. No, not necessarily toxins. Yes, toxins, but especially carbohydrates will become toxic to your liver in overdose.

SCOTT: Okay. So, another analogy might be you're a weightlifter, and you can lift 50 pounds, but you're trying to lift 500?

MARTIN: That's a good line, right? 

SCOTT: Right. So, one of the things that I always want to say is journal. What are you eating? What are you drinking? How much sleep are you getting? How much rest are you getting? Are there things in your life that stress you? And when you write all those things down, you realize that you had a liter of Coke, three donuts, and an apple pie for eating today. And you're not eating well, probably, like most of us aren't eating well. 

So then the next thing is, what can you do to clean that up? And oh, I have a job I hate. Well, what can you do to either like your job or find a job that you like? Oh, I'm watching four hours of Netflix every night. Well, that's you're sitting at the desk at work. You're sitting on the couch at home. So, you're not getting any exercise and you have stagnation and your muscles are atrophied. So, no wonder your body is falling apart, right? So unless you have the self-awareness, I made all that stuff up. I have no idea what this person's situation is. But you really need to look at where am I? And what am I doing? And then of those things that I'm doing, which ones are harming me and which ones are helping me? Oh, I'm tired. I'm tired, too, but I still go for a two-mile walk every day. So, unless it's raining. Okay, that's my excuse. If it's raining, I'm not going.

MARTIN: You don't want to get wet and hypothermic- what's it called? Cold.

SCOTT: I'll get a cold for sure. So, on to the next one. So having said all of that Patty, what about hydrogen oxygen?

MARTIN: Well, all right. So let's just tie it all together. So the liver is the organ, a multifunctional organ. One of its functions is to produce glycogen, which is the human form of glucose. That's the energy source. So that's like gasoline in your combustion-type automobile motor. And the other function of the liver is to produce antioxidants or at least facilitate antioxidation, which would be like the cooling system of your automobile engine, the radiator and the water. And what happens here is this. Every bit of energy released starts as a carbon source. Campfire you have wood, which is like a stored light carbon from the atmosphere with the help of light from the sun becomes wood and then when you burn the thing in presence of oxygen, you're releasing the stored energy. Likewise, when you eat food, you're releasing the stored energy that way, but as you're releasing it, you're also creating excess heat. It's a metaphor. This excess heat will create injuries, micro injuries, right? And so you need to use antioxidants to keep things in balance. You're oxidizing things in order to release the energy and you're using the antioxidant to hold it in containment. Now glutathione is the substance in your liver that is doing the methylation process, the neutralization of things.

Glutathione is recycling vitamins like C's and B's. And the vitamins are the donors of the electrons, which are doing the antioxidant function. And the electron is what happens when you separate the hydrogen element from its nucleus because hydrogen is the simplest thing. One proton in the nucleus, one electron in the orbit. So now, when we ingest- in this case probably inhale- hydrogen gas, we have the ability to strip off the excess electrons leaving the protons behind. By the way, the protons are the H+, which is what's used in the manufacture of hydrochloric acid in your stomach. 

Remember PPI, that stands for proton pump inhibitor. Those are the medications, the purple pills the doctors give you to stop the production of the protons. You actually need more, not less of them, to keep your stomach functioning. So now hydrogen in, electrons to do the antioxidant stuff, and the protons to hit the stomach to do the digestion stuff. And finally she asked it in a very clever way. She said hydrogen oxygen therapy. There is a thing called HHO, separated water. It's also known as Brown's gas. And there are some fairly, well, fancy devices around $2,000 these days that manufacture this Brown’s gas which, when inhaled, gives us a phenomenal dose of both oxygen on the oxygen side for the energy, and hydrogen for the antioxidant side. So the yin and the yang, they meet in the middle, and they manage us to have both energy and not the wear that goes with it, happen at the same time.

SCOTT: Cool. So remember,

MARTIN: Don't ask, don't ask simple questions. You'll always get long answers.

SCOTT: That's the engineer in Martin. So this is a great time for a pattern break. If you're getting any joy and happiness and knowledge and world expansion from our show, please hit the like button, subscribe, share with your friends, tell your friends. And with that, Martin, let's get back to the digestive system. So.

MARTIN: Well, let's just now say to people that if you are not digesting well, you need more hydrochloric acid. Which, tada, HCl should be told about, okay, because if you think that you have heartburn, you don't have it because you have too much acid; you have it from too little acid because the top valve on your stomach closes only when it's acidic enough below.

SCOTT: So Patty had one more comment. “It's my gut stuff. I don't eat grains or dairy or eggs. Sometimes I have colitis with no issues.

MARTIN: So that's further down. Colitis is in the colon. That's inflammation of the colon. She should look at Ttributyrin, which we didn't mention or talk about, but it's the butyric acid that needs to be made by the microbes in the small intestine so that the large intestine can be functioning well. Tributyrin-X, look it up. But you may need to have this, Scott, show the product, the HCl Guard.

SCOTT: Okay. Hang on just a second, everybody.

MARTIN: That's the Strata Flora. That's also useful, but HCL Guard is the one that will make sure that what hits the stomach is digested fully and strongly. And it's not just basic betaine HCL, which you can buy for $20. This is a complex product that also has peptic power supplementation. So this is a complete thing, not just a whatever. And if you're bloating, burping, gassing, whatever, you probably need that.

SCOTT: So Martin, somebody who is who burps, let's say every day, every two days, is that something that they should be concerned about?

MARTIN: They probably are not digesting well. They are probably not producing enough HCL. They probably need to have more hydrogen available. And the most common way to get the hydrogen would have been through this betaine HCl. Or you can do that by putting more salt in your food, believe it or not.

SCOTT: Oh, okay. So, if you're burping all the time, if you're farting all the time, if your stomach is bugging you all the time, you need to do something about it. 

MARTIN: The second thing we should have mentioned is enzymes, digestive enzymes, they need to be supplied in an adequate amount. And of course, cooking your food will destroy enzymes, right? That's why raw food is so useful because raw food still contains enzymes. But if you pick it underripe and then store it in refrigeration and then if you cook it on top of it then most of the enzymes are just reduced, unavailable, and waiting for you to say something wise, Scott.

SCOTT: I thought you were going to say something- well, let's bring up Holozyme. 

MARTIN: That's awesome, the name lo is wonderful. Holozyme. Holo. As in holos as in all. Complete and whole. This really is well-designed, well-rounded. If you'll find it somewhere in there. What's going on in there? Should have been an ingredients in there somewhere.

SCOTT: Sorry, my window was too small and they disappeared.

MARTIN: Okay. See, you have the protease for proteins, amylase for carbohydrates, lipase for fats, cellulase for the fibers, sucrase for dealing with sweet things, and galactosidases and lactase for lactic for milk and maltase for malted things, right? And so on. Anyway, all of the bits that typically are in our foods, it's all stacked in there, and it's well put together to help you digest the foods that you likely eat.

SCOTT: And they have patented absorption technology because that's a big issue, right? You can get good things into your body, but if it's not absorbed, what's the point?

MARTIN: Yeah, George just popped in the most important piece of wisdom. Never mind the input. What do you get out of it? How much do you absorb?

SCOTT:  Right?

MARTIN: And the absorption is predetermined by how much enzyme activity you're able to muster up. And so if you don't have enough enzyme activity, the stuff is passing through you without really being useful, right? You get nothing out of the food you eat.

SCOTT: When you're 17, how many enzymes do you have in your body compared to when you're 55?

MARTIN: It's a lot. The enzyme reserve usually runs out by about age 27, when the body decides, "Oh, they're not going to get me anymore. I better start conserving it." But those are more the systemic enzymes that deal with healing of injuries, bumps, and tears and rips. The digestive enzymes are naturally present in foods like in raw meat or in raw vegetables and raw fruit. It's just that we usually cook the darn stuff. And once you cook it, the enzyme is shot. It's gone.

SCOTT: So, you need to have your salad. And your salad has to be more than just head lettuce.

MARTIN: For sure.

SCOTT: And a variety, right?

MARTIN: You want variety. And you want fresh. And where do you get fresh tomato today? If only, right? You don't.

SCOTT: Well, really, if you want to be a rebel, grow your own. 

MARTIN: Grow your own.

SCOTT: We fought over my dad's tomatoes, and of course he always made sure that they were ripe and ready to pick when we weren't there, and we’d come over like, "Where are those tomatoes?" Oh, I ate them. Sorry. And he had a small garden and he had a small number of tomatoes, but if we ever got them, they were the best things ever.

MARTIN: Exactly. I've grown my own stuff whenever. And you can do amazing things even in a couple of buckets of dirt on a balcony. It is possible.

SCOTT: There are a lot of things now that weren't around before. They have like this water thing.

MARTIN: The next thing coming, Scott, is probably going to be vertical farming, which is going to be essentially farming inside of warehouses or on rooftops of Skyrise buildings where we will be doing rotating crops on little shelves. Oh, and then George pops in with another piece of wisdom. 

SCOTT: Sprouts. 

MARTIN: The most life force is stored in a seed because the seed has everything in it other than water and light to drive the life force forward. So when you first sprout it, the first two, three, four inches of the growth is absolutely loaded with nutrients, including enzymes. 

SCOTT: So there are ways to get these things into your body. I think we need to have a message of hope, right? If you're doing the right things, which is respecting nature at its basics, right? Then you're well on your way to more health. It’s not 100%. People have genetic issues or they get run over by a car. Sorry. But generally speaking, most people's problems are because of what they stick in their mouth and what they watch with their eyes and what they listen to with their ears to, right? And not exercising. So, that's simple but pretty profound when you think about it. All right, we're to the end of where we are, the end of the show.

MARTIN: I want to just pitch something. I want to say that we make these superfood blends in the Exsula shop, which are storing this life force in the form of fresh ingredients that have been freeze-dried so that they have all of that life force still intact. When you just make them wet, they come back to life. Anyway, for digestion, we make a really cool one called Strata-Flora, where the Strata-Flora is a complex blend rich in enzymes, fibers, herbs, probiotics, prebiotics, and oligosaccharides. All of the bits and pieces that are needed in your digestive system in order to,

SCOTT: 100 billion active organisms. It's high-density. Cellulase, Cellulon.

MARTIN: Cellulon is our mix of lecithin and co-enzyme Q10 and vitamins and minerals. All the bits that are needed for the body to function well.

SCOTT: Green Tree extract.

MARTIN: I could spend half an hour telling you about all the bits that are in that.

SCOTT: Right. Which I think is a good time for me to bring up our orangutan friend. They follow this gorilla or monkey or orangutan.

MARTIN: It was orangutan.

SCOTT: For one day. 400,

MARTIN: One week, Scott.

SCOTT: One week. 400 different types of plants and grubs and stuff that he or she ate. So.

MARTIN: A traveling botanist. 

SCOTT: So, Patty says, "Thank you. I do need liver cleanse. I don't bloat or burp."

MARTIN: Well, it's hard for me to answer. Do you or don't you? Right. The answer will be when you do, and you feel better, you needed it. I would say that your number one thing would be to fix the gut before you fix the liver. So, I would start with more enzymes. I would start with maybe the Strata-Flora, which will help you a lot because most of your problems, as you were listing them, are downstream. So I mentioned Tributyrin-X, I would mention Holozyme again, and it's possible that you also need the HCL; maybe those would be the starting point for me. I would also complement it with Humic and Fulvic acid and go from there.

SCOTT: Right. And Martin, will he answer the phones, or one of his health coaches answers the phones. So give us a call and let us know. We can only give general information on the show. But if you want to talk to Martin one-on-one or one of our health coaches, then they can give us some more specific ideas on what to do. And like George says, they're all great products, take advantage of them. I use them. 

MARTIN: The answer to the liver cleanse question is you won't be worse for it if you do one. It's just that you may probably need the gut fix before the liver cleanse, right?

SCOTT: Which is why you really need to talk to somebody who's an expert and who can help you set up a plan, right? Because we hear this on the radio, we see this on TV, we read this article on Facebook and we go, "Oh, I need this. Oh, I need that. Oh, I need this." Are they working together or are they opposing? And do you even need them? Right. Those are all questions that we can't answer because we don't know enough about everybody's individual situation. So, head over to life-enthusiast.com and go to the contact us page and get a hold of Martin and his team and get on the road to vibrant health. So, Martin, any last words before we sign off today?

MARTIN: Oh, I said so many words. It's a complicated thing, and it's complex. You're trying to fix a bicycle while you're riding on it. So, it's going to be interesting. I would say start with water, energized water, not just plain, and filter it before you energize it. And then healthy food: the more living food, the better. Nutrient-dense, not toxic. If it has a barcode on it, it's probably not, well, no, I don't say that, right? If it's in a cardboard box with a list of ingredients that is rather long and hard to pronounce, you probably don't need it.

SCOTT: Yeah. And then get some exercise.

MARTIN: Oh gosh. Most people who have constipation lose it when they walk for 30 minutes a day. The antidote to constipation is walking. Go figure.

SCOTT: Awesome. All right. Thank you, Martin, for taking time out of your busy day. Really appreciate you and the knowledge that you bring. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We're here live every Wednesday, 2:30 pm Eastern time, 11:30 Pacific. Love to get your questions. Love to have some interaction with you. Don't forget to like, subscribe, share this, hit the bell, all those good things. And you've been watching or listening to the Life Enthusiast Health Shots podcast, restoring vitality to you and the planet. And we'll see you next week, everybody. Bye for now.

MARTIN: Bye-bye.