| |
 Print
Gut Feelings
5-02-2018
For many people Ramadan not only heightens their spirituality it also amplifies their sense of living in a physical body. The pangs of hunger are faithful reminders that our bodies are ultimately frail and dependent upon external nourishment to survive. But our bodies are also miraculous. While we are intimately aware of being in our bodies, we don’t often pause to marvel at the wonder under our skin. For the next few columns we’ll take a peek at our organs and systems to gain a deeper appreciation of who we are and how we work from the inside out.
We’ll start with our digestive system – a squeamish topic. Our digestive system, also called the gastrointestinal tract, or GI tract for short, or “gut” in the vernacular, is a very long hollow tube consisting of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and anus, accessorized by the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder. If stretched out straight, our GI tract would measure at least 5 meters long, and, thanks to the millions of little fingerlike protrusions called villi, have a surface area of over 40 square meters, the size of small apartment. The digestive system, obviously, digests whatever we swallow through an elaborate process of breaking down food to extract sugars, amino acids, fatty acids, glycerol, vitamins, and salt which pass through the intestinal lining into the bloodstream to be delivered to the rest of the body. Items deemed undeliverable are sent back to the outside world as urine and stool. We each have a massive miniature private Fedex system running nonstop and, largely unnoticed, inside ourselves.
We also have a legion of little guests living in the darkness that is our gut. Over 100 trillion microbes are alive inside of you at this very moment. The bulk of these unnoticed tenants are bacteria, but we also are host to a range of viruses, yeast, and protozoa. While small they are mighty. Not only do they aid in the breaking down of food, scientists are just beginning to understand the role microbes play in influencing our physiology especially in our immune system, nervous system, and metabolism. Tentative links have been found between the quantity, quality, and variety of our microbes and a range of diseases and disorders including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autism, depression and anxiety. Recent research shows that these microbes and our GI tract play a role in the regulation, or pointedly, the dysregulation of emotions.
The notion that our digestive system is related to our emotional state has been layered into our language through phrases such as “gut feeling,” “butterflies in my stomach,” and “emotional eater.” Even though the GI tract can't use its mouth to talk it does have a lot to say. We're only conscious of a tiny portion of the messages our gut sends to our brain, primarily, “I'm hungry” and “I need to use the washroom.” Nevertheless, our vagus nerve, one of the largest nerves in the body, serves as a bustling information highway between our brain and our gut, with most of the traffic racing from the gut up, not from the brain down. The brain actively listens to these gut messages and files them away in areas such as impulse control, motivation, sudden insight, decision making, emotions, and memory, while, for the most part, bypassing speech and language centres. Since we don't have words for what is going on we tend to discount the messages, at least we think we do. Distress in the gut tends to leak out in an array of physical and emotional ills.
Part of the beauty of our digestive system is that it's hidden away from conscious thought. We don't have to witness the messy process of food being churned and mashed, absorbed and delivered, rejected and packaged for expulsion. Part of the pitfall of our digestive system is that it operates under the covers, out of site, out of mind. We've forgot how to listen to its messages. For many of us we've learned to swallow our emotions along with food and drink. We listen to our stomach growling but we are deaf to intuition. Our body efficiently knows how to rid itself of physical toxins, but we are slow to let go of poisonous feelings. This Ramadan, as you become increasingly aware of food and it’s value, consider reflecting on the wonder of your digestive system in all of its aspects.
The “Mind-Gut Connection” by Emeran Mayer has many more intriguing facts about our second brain. Zainab Dhanani can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
Footnotes:
|