Why You Should Care About Your Digestive System

by Baxter and Nina

Chocolate Kouign Amann by Rosie Gibson

At a very primary level, your digestive system is essential for maintaining your health. After those first gasps of air and the initial cry of a newborn, the first action of a new life is to feed! And a digestive system in decline can be one of the first signs of serious illness or advanced age. The digestive system provides the following four basic functions:

1. Ingestion. Using your mouth to take in foods and fluids, chewing the food, and then swallowing both chewed foods and fluids.
2. Digestion. Breaking down what you eat and drink into smaller and smaller particles, which can then be absorbed into our blood. Anything that can’t be absorbed is passed on for elimination.
3. Absorption. The process of passing the small particles of digested food from the digestive tract into your blood stream, where they can be delivered for fuel to your 70 trillion cells by the circulatory system.
4. Elimination. Removing leftovers of the digestive process that you cannot use from your body. 

These four functions are the how your digestive system provides you with the fuel your body needs to function every day as well as to create the building blocks needed for to growth and repair. And this is also how your digestive system removes waste from your body, a process that is as necessary for your health as ingesting and digesting your food. 

In general, staying physically active, eating a healthy diet and taking in adequate liquids, resting after meals if you can and sleeping well, and good oral care helps you maintain the health of your digestive system. However, one of the most important things you can do to keep your digestive system functioning optimally is to keep your stress levels in check, as stress can have a huge impact on your digestion. (Nina can testify to this, because when she's very stressed out, she literally becomes so nauseated that she can't even eat at all!)

Now let’s take a look at the actual components of your digestive system and the related systems, and the effect that stress can have on them.

Mouth, Tongue, Teeth and Pharynx. Digestion begins as you take food and drink into your mouth and start to break down the food into smaller bits by chewing it and mixing it with your saliva, which contains digestive enzymes. In some people, acute stress can temporarily turn off the production of saliva, negatively affecting your initial breakdown of food.

Esophagus. This tube that runs from the back of your throat to your stomach sack moves your partially mixed food and water to your stomach. In some people, stress can interfere with the smooth muscle rhythm that moves food to the stomach, creating difficulty in swallowing. 

Stomach. Continues digestion by releasing stomach acids and enzymes, and by churning the stomach contents to further break down solids and liquids. In some people, stress can negatively affect digestion by contributing to minor digestive problems, such as heartburn and nausea, as well as more serious problems, such as acid reflux and ulcers. 

Small Intestines. After the stomach finishes its work, the small intestines (a 15-17 feet long tube) use more digestive enzymes to break down the food into even smaller particles of sugars, fats and proteins, which near the end of the tube are then absorbed into your bloodstream. In some people, stress can interfere with smooth movement of food downstream and/or with healthy absorption of food into the circulatory system. 

Large Intestines. After the food particles are absorbed, the large intestines (the final 4-5 feet of tubing that follows after the small intestines), allow most of the remaining water content for our food and fluid intake as well as vitamins and salts to be absorbed into our bloodstream. The waste that remains is collected here and then expelled through your rectum and anus in the form of a bowel movement. Your large intestines are also where much of your gut microbiome lives (see below). In some people, stress can affect the performance of the large intestines, resulting in constipation or diarrhea. 

Liver. Although it has many other functions, the liver aids digestion by producing bile salts, which assist in the breakdown of fatty foods. In some people, stress can produce inflammation in the liver that could contribute to the development of serious liver diseases such as cirrhosis, which will ultimately affect digestion (and cause other serious problems).

Gallbladder. Stores the bile salts made by the liver and releases some into the small intestines when fatty foods are detected. In some people, stress can inhibit the normal release of bile from the gallbladder into the small intestines, which will negatively impact your ability to digest fats appropriately. 

Pancreas. Although it has other functions, the pancreas aids digestion through the production and release of digestive enzymes into the small intestines. In some people, chronic stress makes the pancreas more susceptible to diseases, such as pancreatitis, which will negatively affect its ability to produce digestive enzymes.

Gut Microbiome. The community of microorganisms living in our large intestines and elsewhere in our digestive system make up our gut microbiome. Our gut microbiome has a variety of functions, including the metabolism of certain nutrients in our food, the regulation of our immune system, and modulating various behaviors such as hunger, satiety, and sleep. Maintaining a large variety of the organisms in our gut microbiome is important for the health of our digestive and immune systems as well as for the other systems that interact or communicate with our digestive system, such as the central nervous system. In some people, stress can negatively affect the diversity of the gut microbiome, which has a negative impact on our digestion and overall health.

Enteric Nervous System. A semi-independent web of nerves, the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the gut brain, helps coordinate some of the digestive processes that takes place from the stomach to the beginning of the large intestines, and also signals the brain information that results in feelings of hunger and satiety, whether or not you’re experiencing stress, and if you’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe. 

In some people, stress can interfere with normal signaling of the enteric nervous system contributing to gut symptoms such as cramping and bloating, or causing confused signaling of hunger after stress events that leads to stress eating.

Central Nervous System. To help coordinate your digestive processes your brain is in constant two-way communication with your digestive system though your autonomic nervous system and your hormones. Because of this two-way communication, the health of the central nervous influences the health of the digestive system, and the health of the digestive system influences the central nervous system.

And your state of mind has a profound effect on your digestion. When you are in a state of acute stress, your brain shuts down your digestive system temporarily until the emergency has passed. And when stress is chronic and ongoing, your digestion is compromised because your digestive system isn’t functioning optimally. 

On the other hand, when you’re relaxed and in the Rest and Digest state, your brain turns on the digestive functions that were offline while you were stressed, and is able to work in greater harmony with other systems that support good digestion.

Circulatory System. Delivers absorbed food particles to all the cells, structures and organs of your body, including your digestive system organs themselves by the circulatory system. Water not needed for body functions eventually gets delivered to your kidneys for elimination. In some people, stress can disrupt the normal blood flow to the digestive system, especially to the small intestine, which can compromise the absorption of food into your body. 

Immune System. Along the route of the digestive system are immune functions that are an integral part of the immune system. Examples include:

• salivary enzymes in the mouth, which can kill some organisms that come in with our food
• acidic fluid of the stomach sack, which can kill some invading organisms
• Peyer’s patches, special groups of immune cells that line the inside of small intestines, which can detect and start to fight invaders that make it past the mouth and stomach
• gut microbiome, which may help our immune system adapt more quickly to new infections in the gut

So maintaining the health of your digestive system will aid the functioning of your immune system, just as maintaining the health of your immune system will aid the functioning of your digestive system by keeping your digestive system healthy (see Techniques for Supporting Your Immune System with Yoga).

Because of the importance of your digestive system to the health of your entire body, maintaining healthy digestion is an integral aspect of healthy aging. In general, a well-rounded yoga practice will allow you do this by providing the exercise and stress management—especially stress management!—that you need to keep your digestive system functioning optimally. But if you are experiencing digestive problems, you can target your yoga practice to improve your digestion (see How Yoga Helps Your Digestive System).

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How Yoga Helps Your Digestive System

by Baxter and Nina

Dinner Time by Pablo Picasso*

Before we get into how yoga helps your digestive system, let’s review the general factors that impact our digestive health:

1. Diet
2. Sleep and rest
3. Exercise and general activity levels
4. Stress
5. Chronic diseases 
6. Environmental exposure, such as to chemicals
7. Travel history
8. Antibiotic exposure

While yoga cannot help with all of these factors, it can help with the first five! So yoga is a particularly powerful way to influence your digestion. And depending on the condition you’re addressing, yoga can provide all five types of treatment for digestive problems, from preventative medicine to curative medicine. 

Preventative Medicine. Practicing yoga for physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing will support your overall digestive health. 

Curative Medicine. Many practitioners report that yoga practiced for digestion has resolved longstanding general digestive problems, such as bloating, cramping, irregularities in elimination, and having a “sensitive stomach.”

Maintenance Therapy. For digestive conditions that are stable and non-life threatening but have a history of recurrences, such as irritable bowel syndrome, practicing yoga to support digestive health helps bring the digestive system back into balance during flares and helps extend periods that are symptom free. 

Recovery and Rehabilitation. Gentle restorative poses, breath practices, meditation, and guided relaxation can help shorten recovery times for digestive conditions such as post-gastrointestinal surgery and after a flare of early stage ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease.

Supportive or Palliative Therapy. Practicing yoga to foster digestive health can help support healing for a wide range of problems and illnesses, including:

• sensitive digestive system 
• bloating 
• chronic diarrhea
• chronic constipation 
• irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
• celiac disease 
• reflux (GERD), general heartburn
• peptic and duodenal ulcers 
• inflammatory bowel disorders (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis)

For digestive conditions that are incurable and are progressing, such as Crohn’s disease or advanced gastrointestinal cancers, restorative or very gentle asana practices combined with breath practices, meditation, and guided relaxation can help to relieve or reduce pain, improve sleep and appetite, and lower anxiety and depression. 

Yoga can help support your digestive system in the following ways:

Stress Management. One of the global benefits yoga has on digestion has to do with yoga’s effect on our nervous systems. Not surprisingly, our digestive systems work much more efficiently while we are in Rest and Digest mode. So being able to use yoga’s stress management tools to switch from Fight or Flight mode to Rest and Digest mode and to help us remain in that state, allows your digestive system to function optimally overall. Now, digestion does not cease when we in a state of stress, but chronic stress can lead to imbalances in our digestive system, including:

• decreased peristalsis (movement of food through the digestive tract) and digestion in the small intestines
• halted absorption of food from gut 
• build up of stomach acidity, leading to indigestion and heartburn

Yoga’s stress management tools can help you turn these problems around. Stress management tools may also play a role in maintaining healthy gut bacteria. The community of microorganisms living in our large intestines and elsewhere in our digestive system make up our microbiome. Our microbiome has a variety of functions, including the metabolism of certain nutrients in our food, the regulation of our immune system, and modulating various behaviors such as hunger, satiety, and sleep. Maintaining a large variety of the organisms in our microbiome is important for the health of our digestive and immune systems as well as for the other systems that interact or communicate with our digestive system, such as the central nervous system.

Recent research has shown that chronic stress can actually have a negative effect on the health of your microbiome, by reducing the variety of the microrganisms living in it as well as shifting it to bacterial populations that may have long-term negative health consequences. So using yoga to manage your stress levels will help support the health of your microbiome, providing benefits for the other systems of your body as well.

Asanas. In general, practicing yoga asana for exercise is beneficial for your digestive system as it supports good circulation to the digestive organs, strengthens the muscular supports around the digestive organs, and stimulates good elimination. 

Static poses that strengthen and stretch the abdominal area help tone the abdominal muscles that house and support the majority of the organs of digestion, which helps contain your digestive system safely in your torso, and may assist in movement of material through the system. Dynamic poses that fold, stretch and twist the abdominal area can improve blood and lymph circulation, and create a squeeze and release affect on your organs, which may support improved functioning and stimulate good elimination.

However, there are some conditions for which using asana for exercise may not a good idea, such as severe cases of diarrhea or constipation, or for someone with an acute bout of pain related to their digestive disorders. In such cases, we recommended turning to other yoga tools, including stress management and relaxation. 

Besides using asanas for exercise, you can use restorative poses to shift into the Rest and Digest state. Restorative postures where your chest is lifted and your belly is very relaxed, such as Reclined Cobbler’s pose, can be particularly effective.

Sleep. Using yoga to improve the quality of your sleep will benefit your digestive system as a sound night’s sleep provides a prolonged rest to your entire system, during which you spend time in the Rest and Digest state. See 5 Tips for Better Sleep for recommendations.

Healthy Eating. What we put in our mouths can have a direct effect on our digestion. Some examples of unhealthy eating includes:

• Overeating, which leads to bloating, cramping, discomfort.
• Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, which contributes to ulcers, pancreatitis, and liver disease. 
• Eating foods that we have an allergy or sensitivity to, such as dairy if you are lactose intolerant or gluten if you have celiac disease.
• Eating fatty foods that can aggravate the gall bladder, which is part of the digestive system.
• Eating acidic foods if they worsen conditions such as reflux or hiatal hernia or healing ulcers.

Reducing Chronic Stress. Chronic stress cannot only cause digestive problems, but the cortisol that is released can cause overeating and weight gain by stimulating your appetite. So using your yoga practice to reduce your stress levels and reduce cortisol levels is one of the most important things you can do move toward healthy eating (see Yoga, Stress and Weight Management).

Mindfulness. Many poor eating habits are just that—habits! Practicing yoga asana mindfully and meditating will help you tune into your body, and not to ignore it. And as you tune into your body, you may learn about foods you are currently eating that are compromising your health or notice poor eating habits, such as eating beyond satiety (feeling satisfied). Cultivating mindfulness can teach you to recognize:

• which foods are good for you and which are not (whether that means junk food or food to which you are allergic or intolerant) 
• when you are full and don’t need to eat more
• when you are thirsty instead of hungry
• when you are eating for stress, not for hunger

Mindfulness will also help you start to recognize habitual thoughts that are getting in the way of healthy eating. You can then work on changing your perspective (see Got Mindfulness? and Meditation and Healthy Eating).

Will Power. Once you’ve identified your habits or have decide to eliminate or cut back certain foods, it takes will power to change! According the Dr. Kelly McGonigal, being in a state of stress can increase impulsive behavior and decrease will power. So practicing stress management as we describe above will help with your will power (see Healthy Eating, Stress and Self Control). However, you can also use a meditation practice to intentionally strengthen your will power. Meditation teaches you to return to your object of meditation (your focus) and tune out distractions (temptations). And beyond that, research has demonstrated that is little as 3 hours of accumulated meditation alone can improve willpower. 

“Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness." —Dr. Kelly McGonigal

We hope this information helps you understand why yoga is such a powerful tool for preventing and dealing with digestive problems. Coming soon we'll have a post that includes specific techniques for maintaining the health of your digestive system.

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Healthy Eating and Your Digestive System

by Baxter

I recently heard from a colleague of mine in Portland, Vilma Z, who has hosted me at her lovely studio The Yoga Project in the Sellwood neighborhood over the years.  She was very excited and proud to let me know about a new project she had just completed, a calendar featuring the students from her highly popular class “Yoga for Larger Women.” Vilma has been working with larger women in Portland now for several years, and her experiences and the experiences of her students can be found on the website yogaforthelargerwoman.com. Please go there and read for yourself the amazing transformations these students describe.

Janet from the Yoga for Larger Women Calender

And then this past weekend, I once again offered my workshop on Yoga and the Digestive System.  As part of that course, during Savasana, I guide the students through a journey of their digestive system for start to finish. The last time I taught this guided visualization, several students asked if I had it recorded so they could do the journey again on their own. So, this weekend, honoring that request, I recorded the Journey Through Your Digestive System, and it is now available on Bandcamp at yogaforhealthyaging.bandcamp.com, where you can play it at any time or download it in any number of formats.



I’ve decided to share this recording with you today as part of our series exploring Yoga for Healthy Eating. You might ask yourself the question, “What does having a better understanding of my digestive system have to do with helping me foster healthy eating habits?” Well, one of Vilma’s students, Janet Wieneke, has this to say, which I think has great bearing on this question:

“Around the same time, the thought hit me that I had been dragging this body around for all these past 50 years instead of really living in it.   It came to me that I had not claimed this body, not moved into this body. I was renting it, but I didn’t live there. I didn’t want to live there—in the “undesirable” section of town.

That began to change though when I realized no amount of wishing, bargaining or promising will change the fact that this is my body and that it benefits me greatly to “step up” and partner with my abilities, instead of wishing that things were different.”

So the aspect of healthy eating that has to do with understanding your digestive system is learning to really live in and feel your body, noticing how different foods and meal sizes make you feel, and so on, instead of just wishing things were different. The more in tune you become with how your ingestion and digestion of food makes you feel, the more likely you are to make better decisions in the future regarding healthy eating.

And if you want to support Vilma’s work with larger women in Portland, buy a 2013 Calendar here . The photos—and the women—are lovely! And if you want to support our ongoing work here at Yoga For Healthy Aging, consider purchasing your audio track of the digestive journey from Bandcamp. And let us know how you liked the tour!

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