What role does food play in our stomach?
How today’s food upsets our stomach
Thousands of books have been written about good nutrition. There are hundreds of concepts describing what foods to eat and how to do it right. But your craving for healthy eating can prove helpless in the face of a strong craving for the joys of eating. Diet has long since lost much of its original purpose—to fill you up—despite the theories of good nutrition that claim to do just that. Today’s man’s food has long since turned into a pleasure.
Let’s look at the eating process itself
Eating starts with thinking, for example it’s time for dinner. The thoughts paint a picture of enjoying dinner. And when the meal is on the table in front of you, the real pleasure begins. At first, the eyes delight in the appearance of the contents of the meal. Then the receptors in the nose that breathe in the aroma absorb the pleasure. After that, the taste buds in your mouth take over. The entire food industry fights day and night to ensure your taste buds are not disappointed in the anticipation of the treat. There are even entire industries that produce products that are not for nutrition, but solely for the pleasure of your receptors – candies, sweets, spices and condiments. But the rest of the food industry also takes care of the variety of flavors, their constant renewal – all for the pleasure of the mouth’s receptors. It is in the nature of receptors that they are the most dynamic organs in the digestive chain. You constantly need new impressions. This is not the case with the stomach.
And the look of the food?
Today’s restaurants have reached a level of artistry in the way they arrange the food on their plates that is comparable to masterpieces of painting. If you think that your stomach, like your eyes, loves colors and food combinations just for the sake of looking good, you’re wrong. If you enjoy the looks of food, you should know that for your taste and your visual receptors, the manufacturing companies are always developing new flavors and products, creating unimaginable combinations, fantastic colors and the like. They know that you make the decision to eat this or that product not based on the needs of your stomach, but on the desires of the receptors.
How much food can your stomach take?
So dinner goes to your stomach. How much? The crowd that gives the eyes and taste buds the most pleasure and the stomach has time to send a last-minute message to the brain: “That’s it, I can’t take it anymore!” Has anyone experienced such sensations in their Stomach like discomfort, heaviness, heartburn or pain experienced? Hardly anyone would deny it. The composition and quantity of the food we eat brings joy to our eyes and mouth and distress to our stomachs. And yet the stomach is a much more important organ than the taste buds. And as far as nutrition goes, we don’t think about it at all. At the last moment we decide on a piece of cake and stuff it into our stomachs. Eating right starts with curbing your taste buds. Enjoying the taste buds is secondary. Proper nutrition should put the sensations of the stomach in the first place. The stomach is a rather conservative organ. He gets used to a certain composition of food, which gives him a certain algorithm of digestion, a kind of “workflow”. There is no harm in knowing what the stomach requires of the food you put into it. So what does our stomach want?
1. The temperature of the food
When the stomach absorbs chilled foods, such as cold beer or ice cream, the stomach warms those foods to body temperature before digesting them. This is necessary because cold food also cools down the pancreas and other organs involved in digestion, causing them to malfunction. And this has a negative effect on the activity of the stomach. Therefore, for a comfortable functioning of the stomach, it is necessary to consume cold foods in very limited quantities and not to combine them with the intake of other, primarily fatty, foods.
2. Concentrated foods in moderation
The food industry has learned over the last century how to make concentrated products – sugars, vegetable oils and various concentrates. She has also learned to process natural products to create new “processed” products – various pastes, sweets, sausages, cheeses, etc. But mankind has been around for millions of years and to the stomach these new foods and combinations of ingredients are – unfamiliar , difficult to digest substances. After all, the stomach was programmed by nature to eat traditional, “natural” foods. So if these new foods can be included in your diet, they should only be in small amounts and should not form the basis of your meal.
3. Good digestion takes time
The “technical process” of digestion is a series of sequential operations performed by the stomach. This process takes between one and six hours, depending on the composition of the food. Until the stomach has completed this process, there is no need to fill it with new food. This means that “snacking” is highly undesirable. Imagine a washing machine is doing the laundry. And now, while rinsing, you want to put in a new load of laundry and pour in the powder. Luckily the washing machine door is locked so you can’t do that. You need to “block” your mouth without preventing your stomach from digesting properly.
4. Avoid fried foods
Fried and overheated foods – fried “golden” crusts of meat, fish or vegetables, chips, etc. – These are all very hard on the stomach to digest. The stamina of the stomach for such food should not be abused.
5. Understand what your stomach digests well
The acidity, the composition of the digestive bacteria and other parameters of the stomach are very individual for each person. So you have to learn to understand your stomach, which foods and their combinations it likes to digest and which it “strikes” against. Recommendations for “healthy” foods and eating habits that you read in books or hear from acquaintances may not suit you at all. You need to know what type of food, at what time, and in what quantity your stomach can tolerate best. The reality is that it is not always possible to meet these requirements. The good news is that a healthy stomach may well be able to handle a brief transgression without major consequences to your health. The bad news is that if you constantly violate these requirements, you have to face unpleasant consequences in the form of various diseases, such as obesity.
6. Listen to the signals from your stomach
Listen to the sensations in your stomach. Pain, heaviness, and discomfort are distress signals of varying intensity that your stomach uses to tell you that you are violating some of its requirements. Never ignore these signals. After a few years of observing your stomach, you will be able to identify the causes of these signals and change your eating habits accordingly. If you don’t have the willpower to say “no” to yourself, learn psychological techniques to curb your cravings. Don’t become dependent on your receptors, but make friends and take more care of your stomach, then it will thank you. And that has a lot to do with our health.
