Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ

by Giulia Enders

produces more than twenty unique hormones.

Trees are not spoons, and the gut is our body’s most underrated organ. This is its inside story.

Hemorrhoids, digestive diseases like diverticulitis, and even constipation are common only in countries where people generally sit on some kind of chair to pass their stool.

Two of them are located on the inside of your cheeks, opposite your upper molars, more or less in the middle. If you explore the area with your tongue, you will feel two tiny bumps. If they notice them at all, most people assume they must have bitten themselves in the cheek at some point, but they haven’t.

Would have never guessed those were connected to the gut!

Saliva is basically filtered blood. The salivary glands sieve the blood, keeping back the red blood cells, which are needed in our arteries, not in our mouth.

But calcium, hormones, and some products of our immune system enter the saliva from the blood.

Our saliva contains one painkiller that is stronger than morphine. It is called opiorphin and was only discovered in 2006. Of course, we produce only small amounts of this compound, otherwise we would be spaced out on our own spit all the time!

which explains why a sore throat often feels better after a meal and even minor sores in the oral cavity hurt less.

even chewing gum provides us with a dose of our oral anodyne.

There are even a handful of new studies showing that opiorphin has antidepressant properties. Is our spit partly responsible for the ...

The fact that we produce so little saliva at night explains why many people have bad breath or a sore throat in the morning.

Sometimes, little white stones can be found hiding in the crypts, and these stones smell terrible! Often, people have no idea they are there, and they spend weeks trying unsuccessfully to get rid of bad breath or a strange taste in their mouth.

Wow

Building a healthy immune system is not only important for warding off colds, it also has an important part to play in keeping our heart healthy and in controlling our body weight. For example, removing the tonsils of a child younger than seven can lead to an increased risk of obesity.

Since the abdomen presses against the stomach from below, it would be a bad idea for the esophagus to dock directly onto the top end of the stomach. Connected as it is at the side, it has to deal with only a fraction of the pressure.

The stomach could be called the Quasimodo of the digestive organs. But its misshapen appearance has a deeper meaning. When we take a drink of water, the liquid can flow straight down the shorter, right-hand side of the stomach to end up at the entrance to the small intestine. Food, on the other hand, plops against the larger side of the stomach.

So our stomach is not simply lopsided; rather, it has two sides with different specializations.

One side copes better with fluids, the other with solids. Two stomachs for the price of one, so to speak.

Why does the small intestine have to be so huge, anyway? In total, the surface area of our digestive system is about one hundred times greater than the area of our skin.

But this is what it’s all about inside our belly: we enlarge ourselves as much as possible in order to reduce anything from outside to the smallest size we can, until it is so tiny that our body can absorb it and it eventually becomes a part of us.

This happens inside so many cells at the same time that the heat produced keeps our body at a constant temperature of 97 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit (36 to 37 degrees Celsius).

So this is why i feel cold when fasting? 🤔

many researchers also believe that postprandial tiredness may be due to the resulting reduced blood supply to the brain.

Certain messenger chemicals released by the body when we are full can also stimulate the areas of the brain responsible for tiredness.

It means the optimum amount of energy is available for digestion and our blood is not full of stress hormones. The

Although far removed from the rest of its kind, the appendix is part of the tonsillar immune tissue.

It leaves only good germs alive and attacks anything it sees as dangerous, and this also means a healthy appendix acts as a storehouse of all the best, most helpful bacteria.

The small intestine

It doggedly processes leftovers for sixteen hours or so.

So, if you want to do your liver a favor and still need to take fever-reducing or other medication, make use of the shortcut via the rectum and use a suppository.

So you put a pill up your butt?? 🥴

So, wholegrain bread is not a sugar explosion, but a beneficial sugar store.

Sugar is the only substance our body can turn into fat with little effort.

Glycogen reserves are soon used up—just about the time during your run when you notice the exercise is suddenly much harder work. That is why nutritional physiologists say we should do at least an hour’s exercise if we want to burn fat. It is not until we pass through that first energy dip that we start to tap into those fine reserves.

Fat is the most valuable and efficient of all food particles.

Some of the most important hormones in our body are made out of fat, and every single one of our cells is wrapped in a membrane made largely of fat.

Fat is not soluble in water—it would immediately clog the tiny blood capillaries in the villi of the gut

So fat must be absorbed via a different route: the lymphatic system. Lymphatic vessels are to blood vessels as Robin is to Batman.

But merrily drizzling your olive oil into the pan for frying is not such a good idea as heat can cause a lot of damage. Hotplates are great for frying up steaks or eggs, but they are not good for oily fatty acids, which can be chemically altered by heat. Cooking oil or solid fats such as butter or hydrogenated coconut oil should be used for frying. They may be full of the much-frowned-upon saturated fats, but they are much more stable when exposed to heat. Fine oils are not only sensitive to heat, they also tend to capture free radicals from the air.

That’s why you should always close the bottle or container of olive oil carefully after use and keep it in the fridge.

Having examined carbohydrates and fats, there is just one more nutritional building block to consider. It is probably the least familiar: amino acids.

There are plants that do contain all the necessary amino acids in the necessary quantities. Two of these are soy and quinoa, but others include amaranth, spirulina, buckwheat, and chia seeds.

Those tiny particles can enter the lymphatic system, embedded in fat droplets, and once there, they attract the attention of ever-vigilant immune cells. When the immune cells discover a tiny particle of peanut in the lymphatic fluid, for example, they naturally attack it as a foreign body. The next time the immune cells encounter a peanut particle, they are better prepared to deal with it and can attack it more aggressively. And so it goes on, until we reach the stage where just putting a peanut in our mouth causes our immune cells to whip out the big guns straightaway. The result is increasingly severe allergic reactions, such as extreme swelling of the face and tongue. This explanation applies to allergies caused by foods that are both fatty and rich in protein, such as milk, eggs, and, most commonly, peanuts. There is a simple reason almost no one is allergic to greasy bacon. We are made of meat ourselves, and so we generally have few problems digesting it.

Another theory about how allergies develop is this: the wall of our gut can become temporarily more porous, allowing food remnants to enter the

tissue of the gut and the bloodstream.

In humans, gluten can pass into the cells of the gut in a partially undigested state.

This allows wheat proteins to enter areas they have no business being in.

That, in turn, raises the alarm in our ...

there are many other indicators for categorizing human blood, including what doctors call DQ markers. Those who do not belong to group DQ2 or DQ8 are extremely unlikely to have celiac disease.

Unlike in celiac disease, however, no undigested lactose particles pass through the gut wall. They simply move on down the line, into the large intestine, where they become food for the gas-producing bacteria there.

Although the results can be unpleasant, lactose intolerance is far less harmful to health than undiagnosed celiac disease.

When there is so much fructose in our gut that most of it cannot be absorbed into the blood and we lose that sugar, we also lose the tryptophan attached to it. Tryptophan, for its part, is needed by the body to produce serotonin—a neurotransmitter that gained fame as the happiness hormone after it was discovered that a lack of it can cause depression. Thus, a long-unrecognized fructose intolerance can lead to depressive disorders.

High sugar intake connected to depression.

Serotonin not only puts us in a good mood, it is also responsible for making us feel pleasantly full after a meal. Snack attacks or constant grazing on snacks may be a side effect of fructose intolerance if they are accompanied by other symptoms, such as stomachaches.