Full Transcript Introduction to Gut Health and Digestion 0:00 Are you bloated, tired, sick, or stuck after a meal? 0:06 Let's talk about which foods you should eat to tackle the most common gut health problems today. 0:12 Because food is medicine. 0:15 Do you want to live well? 0:17 Meaning, do you want to stay well? 0:19 Not wait to make changes until you're already sick? 0:21 Well, welcome to my home. 0:23 Let's go on this journey together. 0:25 In this section, we're going to be talking about the first step in the digestive process, which is breaking food down. 0:33 Now, some of the symptoms you might be experiencing if that's not going well for you is bloating, acid reflux, kind of that sour stomach feeling. 0:43 pain right after eating, pain underneath your rib cage right here, this is actually where your stomach is, all of those things signal that the food isn't 0:52 getting broken down very well. 0:54 So let's talk through this for just a moment. 0:57 In the perfect scenario, when digestion is working right, you smell food, all of a sudden the saliva starts Building up,
Signs of Poor Stomach Acid and the Baking Soda Test 1:05 it's getting ready for the food to come. 1:07 Once you've chewed and swallowed, the enzymes in the stomach start to get churning, as does the stomach acid. 1:14 Now, a lot of times food, particularly proteins, are like Legos. 1:18 They have all these little bricks stuck together in different ways. 1:21 Well, when they hit that stomach acid, the acid actually breaks these apart into tiny little pieces that your body knows what to do with. 1:31 So it churns them around, it breaks them apart. 1:34 Once it's all broken apart, there's a valve at the bottom of the stomach that opens and allows the food to dump into the next phase of digestion. 1:42 If there's not enough acid here for the breaking apart to happen, the food stays. 1:48 It doesn't get dumped. 1:49 And if it stays long enough, it starts to ferment. 1:52 It starts to create gas. 1:53 That gas builds up. 1:54 That's what we feel, the burping, the nausea, the pain, and then opens up the valve that comes upward and you get the acid in the back of your throat and 2:03 you think, oh no, I have too much stomach acid. 2:07 That's not the problem. 2:08 The problem is that you had too little stomach acid. 2:10 The food couldn't get broken apart correctly. 2:14 So I want to show you a real quick test you can do at home to decide, is this your problem? 2:19 I call it the baking soda test. 2:21 You're going to take a half a cup of water, a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, mix them together and drink it. 2:28 Now the goal with this is this baking soda should interact with your stomach acid. 2:33 you're gonna drink this all the way down in one swallow. 2:37 I'm not gonna do it because what will come next is a burp and we want you burping in two to three minutes. 2:44 So drink it all down the hatch. 2:47 You time to see how long it takes you to burp. 2:50 If you're burping in two to three minutes, it means that baking soda interacted with the stomach acid properly, you have enough, 2:56 you're good to go. 2:57 Your gut issues do not happen up here. 3:00 That's really what you need to determine. 3:02 If you don't burp within that two to three minute time, or if you have some of those telltale symptoms, that bloating, gassy,
Using Bitters and Acidic Foods to Support Digestion 3:10 acid refluxy feeling, then this is where you need to stop, or this is where you need to start, because this is the place to work on first. 3:18 We need to rebuild that stomach acid. 3:21 It's not about less acid, it's about actually more acid. 3:24 We need to give the body a reason to turn on that acid process. 3:28 So a couple of things you're going to do. 3:30 First of all, we're going to talk about bitters. 3:32 Now, arugula and radicchio, there's a few things like that that are very bitter, as are even things like ginger. 3:40 And then there's foods that are acidic, lemon. 3:43 sauerkraut, kimchi, apple cider vinegar. 3:46 These all actually bring their own acid with them. 3:49 So they're going to help stimulate the acid and supplement the acid in the stomach. 3:54 So this is a real easy thing to do at the beginning of a meal. 3:58 First of all, lemon in water. 4:00 Have you heard of that? 4:01 A lot of people get lemon in their water. 4:04 There's a reason for it. 4:05 That lemon juice actually helps the digestive process. 4:08 But one key to that is it works better if the water is warm. 4:13 When you drink cold water, it actually paralyzes the digestive system a little and it doesn't work as well. 4:18 So warm lemon water is a fabulous thing to do right before a meal. 4:22 Then, We're just making a little salad with some arugula. 4:26 Bitters stimulate the body to create more saliva, which stimulates the body to create more acid. 4:32 So I'm just mixing a little bit of lemon juice in with some salt. 4:36 A little salt before a meal will also stimulate more acid production. 4:40 It just turns the body on, tells it it's time. 4:43 So this is a very simple salad. 4:45 If you don't want a whole bowl of roughage basically, and I'll tell you if your stomach is not digesting well, this is actually really hard for you to digest. 4:53 So another way to do this is to just saute it. 4:57 So we're gonna put some of it over here on the stove and cook it with that lemon juice and a little bit of olive oil. 5:05 We'll put a little bottle of olive oil on both of these. 5:07 So a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of lemon, a little bit of salt, and Two ways to get those bitters in. 5:17 If you don't really like how bitter they are, they'll still work even if you add a little bit of maple syrup. 5:23 So this salad is dressed with olive oil, maple syrup, a little bit of lemon and salt. 5:28 Deliciousness. 5:30 And this is gonna just stimulate your body to do what it needs to do with all the other foods that you eat after this. 5:38 So this is a great way to get things moving. 5:41 You'll see this over here is just gonna shrink down to almost nothing. 5:45 So this is a really great side dish to add to any other thing that you're making. 5:49 This will cook down in about three minutes. 5:51 We don't have to add anything other than just that little bit of olive oil that we put on top.
Golden Milk and Warm Digestive Remedies 5:56 And this sometimes is an easier way to get that bitter green into a meal. 6:01 So we'll come back to that in just a minute. 6:04 I also want to show you how to make golden milk. 6:08 Turmeric, ginger, they're also very good at stimulating acid production. 6:12 So we're going to add a little bit of your favorite kind of milk, preferably actually not dairy milk, because if you are struggling to digest things, 6:22 Dairy is a big protein, and if you're not breaking it apart well, your body won't know what to do with it. 6:27 So I prefer actually almond milk. 6:29 We're gonna add the turmeric, ginger, some cinnamon, a little bit of vanilla makes it taste delicious, some pepper. 6:43 Why pepper? 6:44 Because pepper actually makes that turmeric work better. 6:48 And a little bit of honey to make it taste great. 6:52 So that's all we're doing for golden milk. 6:55 I'm gonna blend this up and then we're gonna come back and see what this looks like when it's ready to go. 7:02 We're gonna wanna heat it because remember, hot digests a little easier than cold. 7:06 So let's go blend this and we'll come back and look at it. 7:15 All right, I've gotta blend it up. 7:17 I'm gonna go put it in the pan and we're gonna heat this up You can see how simple that was. 7:24 It's delicious. 7:26 And this is a treat for me. 7:28 I don't feel like I'm even doing any kind of medicine when I'm drinking this golden milk. 7:33 You can see how quickly this arugula cooked down and looks almost like there's nothing here. 7:39 That's really simple to add this as a side dish to anything. 7:43 And again, this is just gonna stimulate that stomach acid to work a little bit better. 7:48 So let's wrap this up. 7:50 We're going to heat this up just a little bit and show you what we've come up with for all the foods that will help when the problem is up here. 7:57 Food not breaking down. 8:01 Okay, we have the golden milk all done. 8:04 Let's go through what we've talked about today. 8:07 The first part of digestion is breaking food apart. 8:10 There has to be enough stomach acid there to actually do the job. 8:14 If you've taken the baking soda test and there is not enough stomach acid, then you need to either supplement with adding acidic foods like apple cider vinegar,
Recap: Foods That Help Break Down Food 8:23 kimchi, sauerkraut, lemon juice, all of these things will add or You need to add foods that will stimulate more acid production like ginger, 8:32 avocado, fennel. 8:34 Have you ever seen these at an Indian restaurant? 8:38 They often are sitting on the countertop. 8:40 Why? 8:40 Because you pop one in your mouth and you chew it and it actually helps you digest better. 8:45 Fennel is great for that. 8:47 We made a salad out of arugula and spinach with a little bit of lemon juice. 8:52 Remember the acid salt, which stimulates acid formation, a little bit of olive oil and a little maple syrup to make it taste good. 8:58 We also sauteed those same greens. 9:01 Warm lemon water. 9:02 If you drink this before a meal, every meal will digest a little bit better. 9:05 And then the golden milk. 9:08 This is a treat. 9:09 The turmeric, the ginger, the cinnamon, all of those things are actually going to stimulate your digestion, help you digest better. 9:18 The warm is going to soothe on its way down and help everything work better. 9:22 So remember, pay attention to what your body is telling you. 9:26 treat the symptom, it's sharing and you will see resolution of your symptoms and you're going to just feel better.
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