FASTING IS A TREND WE GET TO DO EVERY NIGHT
There’s a bit of a craze for something called intermittent fasting. A well-known British politician has admitted that he follows this trend, that involves skipping meals, or alternatively, skipping food completely every other day. Â
If the object of this is to expel food or waste from the whole digestive tract, it’s not going to happen. Food takes around thirty-seven hours to completely pass the whole route, so this practice just means empty gaps in the upper stages of the whole system.Â
The truth is that most of us fast without realizing it. Fasting is defined as not eating for over ten or twelve hours, and if we have supper at six in the evening and eat nothing more till breakfast, then we will have achieved that time.Â
We may not have consciously thought about this, but the word breakfast means exactly that; in other words, we break our fast.Â
The whole purpose of eating is to get energy. This requires the body to get at a dozen different vitamins and a slightly fewer number of minerals. It also needs a great deal of oxygen from breathing and during digestion.Â
The minerals and vitamins are available in a variety of raw fresh food, but when food is over-processed, we are unlikely to have a healthy diet providing all those nutrients.Â
Most of these nutrients are absorbed into blood capillaries in the lining of the small intestines. By the time the chyme enters the large intestine most of the work has been completed. The large intestine holds onto the waste a bit longer to absorb water.Â
Throughout the digestive tract from mouth to anus there live a kilo or two of bacteria. This was unknown until the invention of microscopes just three hundred and fifty years ago. And not until the most recent century has anyone understood the importance of them.
The realisation that they many of them are a vital and necessary part of the final breakdown of food to help release all those nutrients is now a new science. But this has become even more interesting with the realization that this whole gut microbiome is closely connected to our brain.Â
All of us suffer now and again with minor gut problems from excess wind, bloating, constipation and a dozen other problems. Some people manage to work out that this may be a result of consistently eating over refined heavily processed junk food.Â
A change of diet and something like Oxy Powder, a supplement that can help break up compacted faecal matter, often helps.Â
But it’s also helpful to try and understand the powerful connection between brain and gut that is now recognised as the gut brain axis.Â
This connection that is physically joined by a recently discovered vagus nerve, reveals that an ailment in one part is often reciprocated in the other. In other words, constipation may have a detrimental effect on moods, headache or depression.
















