Your gut is a factory!
Your gut is a factory
Give it a chance to process the throughput!
This was a response to a patient contacting me while they were on holiday with a concern about possible gastroenteritis following a bout of suspected food poisoning. They had eaten a very large portion of home-cooked beef stew; nobody else in the group had suffered any after effects, but they were locals.
It does sound most like meat originated food poisoning. It is always possible that it just happened to be the part of the meat that you ate that was affected. And also possible that the ‘locals’ have a different gastrointestinal environment and biome that is more protective.
Large quantities of food overwhelm the GI tract’s first line of defence, the stomach acid. This gastric acid not only starts the process of digesting proteins, but also protects against microbial pathogens.
When you have a lot of food in the stomach it literally dilutes that acid, raises the pH, and weakens the defence against microbes.
Give your food processing factory, otherwise known as your gastrointestinal tract a chance:
- Don’t eat too much at one meal!
- Think about your gastrointestinal tract as a
food processing factory - each part (mouth,
stomach,
small
intestine,
colon) has a job to do and supplies chemicals and enzymes in order to process the various food stuffs.
- But there are is a finite supply of those chemicals, and if too much food is allowed into the ‘factory’, those chemicals will be exhausted and some food will not be processed in time in the correct part of the factory.
- The excess will enter the wrong areas and cause problems!