My Responsibility with Regard to My Potential

And Yours with Regard to Yours

We have all seen it before. A naturally gifted athlete with tons of potential refuses to work to develop that potential, and he or she ends up wasting it. We had a guy like that on our team.

It is sad.

I find it easy to get judgmental about that guy and about others who waste their potential.

Yet, it occurs to me that I also have specific and unique talents, abilities, and background that create my potential. The real question is whether I am putting in the work to realize my potential? Am I living up to my potential or am I instead wasting it?

That is a challenging question to answer with total honesty.

I have come to believe that it is my ethical responsibility to live up to my potential and to achieve my ambitions. To do anything less is to waste what I have been given. To me, that would be unethical.

My family, my community, and my world are counting on me to contribute what I can and to be the best version of me possible. They deserve nothing less.

So how do I achieve my potential?

Dan Fogelberg’s lyrics in “Run for the Roses” resonate with me:

It’s breeding
And it’s training
And it’s something unknown
That drives you and carries you home

While he is talking about race horses, I find application there for us. There is nothing we can do about our “breeding,” but the training and the “something unknown” is where we can reach our potential.

So, what is your potential? What is your responsibility with regard to it? What are you doing today to achieve it?

I’m Having Trouble Seeing My Goals Through All This Clutter

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I have always been a goal-driven guy. To me it is exciting to set a goal and then work to achieve it. I have never regretted setting and accomplishing a goal. Looking backward I have sometimes regretted that there were goals I did not set, and therefore never achieved. For the most part, though, I have had no shortage of goals. I still do not.

My goals are usually well structured to include all of the necessary ingredients to conform to the SMART acronym:

Specific

Measurable

Actionable

Realistic

Time-bound

Sometimes, though, I allow the busy-ness of life to obscure my goals. The urgent often distracts me from my goals. At moments like this (in fact, this is now a moment like that) I try to simplify.

  • What is really important?

  • Why am I spending so much energy and time on the urgent instead of the important?

  • How can I clear the clutter, re-focus on the goal, and then zero in on the short-term objectives and next actions to make the goal possible?

  • What is the worst thing that will happen if I ignore the urgent?

These are not just questions I am asking myself. I invite you to share what works for you as well. I want to know how you deal with this. Please use the comments on this post to share your experience with me and our readers.

Like you, I have important goals to accomplish and only a limited amount of time to achieve them. It’s time to get with the program.

Soon I will be posting the next article in the series “How I Lost 50 Pounds.” Don’t miss a post in that series. Subscribe to the Forward Story newsletter to be notified when new articles are posted. In addition, you will receive my free eBook 15 Questions to Change Your Life.

 

 

How I Lost 50 Pounds (Part Three)

The Role of the Large Intestine

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Colon

In Part Two of this series we examined the structure of the small intestine and how nutrients are absorbed from the food slurry that moves through. The muscular process that keeps the slurry moving through the length of the small intestine is called the Migrating Motor Complex (MMC). This same process continues to move the slurry out of the small intestine and into the large intestine. Before we move on to what happens to the absorbed nutrients, we need to do a brief overview of the large intestine. The large intestine is also known as the colon. It is “large” in that it is larger in diameter than the small intestine. It is much shorter, though, as the colon is a little less than 5 feet in length. Under normal circumstances the process in the colon from entry to exit takes between fifteen and twenty hours.

Creative Commons Deed CC0

Creative Commons Deed CC0

There are two primary functions of the colon that I want to mention.

  1. Microbiome digestion. Your gut is populated by organisms that are not actually part of you in the way that your organs and cells are part of you. These are actually separate organisms that are the “good bacteria” that help with certain nutrients that could not be broken down higher in the tube. The reality of this colony still surprises and amazes me.  When you see advertising for probiotics, it is this colony of bacteria in your gut that they are claiming their product will help you build and nourish. The common terms used for this colony of good bacteria are gut microbiome or gut flora. Certain foods we eat can help nourish and build the microbiome. This includes cultured foods like yogurt, drinks like kombucha and kefir, and fermented foods like sauerkraut. This microbiome breaks down certain nutrients and allows for the production of vitamin K and other vitamins. So, how many of these good bugs live in your colon? Believe it or not, they number in the trillions with a “t.” It is important to note that while most of the good bacteria is found in the colon, there are also beneficial bacteria that live in the small intestine. Many health issues occur when the good bacteria in the gut do not thrive and when bad bacteria do thrive. Here is an outstanding article on bacteria and the small intestine. I hope to write a separate article later with more detail on the microbiome of the nutrition tube.
  2. Removal of liquids and formation of solid waste. While we did not mention it earlier, water has been absorbed already throughout the small intestine. Now as the process continues, the remaining water is absorbed into the body and solid waste is left in the colon to ultimately be eliminated from the body. The removed water ultimately ends up passing through the kidneys, into the bladder, and out as liquid waste.

There are obviously serious disorders and diseases of each component of the nutrition tube that require the expertise of medical professionals to diagnose and treat. The explanation I have provided in this series is my understanding of how a non-diseased gastrointestinal tract should work. Some of the disorders of the digestive system can be treated with a nutritional approach, but some require more aggressive intervention.

Conclusion

With that much too brief treatment of the colon, we have finished tracking the slurry through the complete nutrition tube from top to bottom. In the next article we will go back to the small intestine where we said that most of the nutrients from the slurry make it through the inner walls and are absorbed into the blood stream. Ponder the thought that these nutrients escape the nutrition tube and enter into your blood. Now they become part of you.

My next questions are:

  1. What happens to these nutrients when they enter the blood stream?
  2. How does the body make use of them, and how does that decision you made several hours earlier to eat 1,000 calories of doughnuts or broccoli impact the body’s chemistry and how those nutrients are used?

As with every question we have asked so far, these are actually very complicated questions. We will explore them in Part Four.

Don’t miss a post in this series. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when new articles are posted. In addition, you will receive my free eBook 15 Questions to Change Your Life.

Tweets of the Week: Recipes, Health, & Wisdom

Week of May 24, 2015

twitter-bird-2Saturday is a good day to recap the activity from our Twitter feed from the past week. Not sure what Twitter is all about? That’s OK. Neither are we (or at least it remains somewhat mysterious to us). There is no denying, however, that there is some very valuable information shared on Twitter. That is what this weekly feature is all about. Click the links below to check out the good stuff. Here are my Top Tweets from this past week, great for retweeting (whatever that is). If you missed these, follow Forward Story on Twitter.

Here are a couple of recipes from Maria Emmerich, a master of gluten-free and low carb cooking:

Low Carb Pancake http://buff.ly/1Aq7DWf

Fudgsicles http://buff.ly/1IVmf0L

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 Some great information related to health:

A Hedge against Drought: Why Healthy Soil is ‘Water in the Bank’ https://shar.es/1rFlGK 

I know it’s counter-intuitive: Why People Who Sleep Longer Achieve More http://mhyatt.us/1wSPmLK 

When Daily Life Is Exercise, Everywhere Is the Gym http://www.cavemandoctor.com/2015/05/19/when-daily-life-is-exercise-everywhere-is-the-gym/

“Food should not contain ingredients, it should be an ingredient.” http://bit.ly/1Ap712w 

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A little wisdom from two great sources:

New Podcast Episode: The Secret Power of Smiling http://mhyatt.us/1HL5lQY 

How to Run a Debt-Free Business Without Running Out of Cash [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/1AhZZgg 

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Great flood safety tips:

5 ways you can be ready when a flood hits: http://abt.cm/1PNgR5m 

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Seth Godin is always thought-provoking:

Seth’s Blog: The do over – http://bit.ly/1IXiOrS

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Here is a wonderful article from Susan Adcox that speaks to grandparents helping their grandchildren cope with cancer:

When a family member is diagnosed with cancer, grandparents can help grandchildren cope: http://ow.ly/NwFc2

How I Lost 50 Pounds (Part Two)

How Does Food Get Absorbed?

In Part One of this series I laid out my understanding of the alimentary canal, or as I call it, the Nutrition Tube. Understanding the basics of how it works was my first step in losing 50 pounds and reaching a better level of health.

As a reminder (and a sort of disclaimer), I am not a doctor or a nutritionist. That is both bad and good. It is bad because I have only a layman’s understanding of the fine details. You should not turn to me to learn the scientific intricacies of your body’s anatomy or biology. There are plenty of qualified people you can turn to for that. It is good because health and nutrition should belong to you and me regardless of whether we are scientists or not. This is my life and my body. I need to understand how it works and what it needs to function optimally. So, this series is not a scientific paper or an argument. It is really just a sharing of what I have learned so far and how that has led me to a much better place health-wise. I am always learning, so I expect that I will learn some additional things by writing this series. The comments section at the bottom is a good place for us to have a conversation if you agree or disagree with something you find here. We can learn together. I am not a fanatic about this. I am a student.

With that out of the way, let’s get started with a couple of analogies.

Your Engine

DSC06930-BIf your car or truck has a gasoline engine, what would happen if you filled it with water? Everyone knows it would not run at all. Your engine was designed to burn a precise mixture of gasoline and air. That precise combustible mix explodes when the spark plugs fire. These explosions over and over again in sequence drive the pistons inside the cylinders which turn the crankshaft and propel your vehicle down the road. If the mixture of fuel is not gas and air, but rather water and air, you will get no explosions. In fact, even if you were to fill your tank half with gasoline and half with water, your engine may sputter and try to run a bit, but it will still not run as designed.

Think of your Nutrition Tube as you do your gas tank. Let’s assume for a moment that your body has been designed to run optimally on a precise mix of fuel — whatever that precise mix is. If you fill your Nutrition Tube with something other than that precise mix, your body is not going to function optimally. It may sputter and try to run, but ultimately you may end up sick and overweight.

Your Chemistry Lab

As we explore the way the food we eat nourishes us, I want you to pay special attention to the chemical processes at work. I ran across a quote in my reading or listening that really makes this point. I wish I could remember who wrote or said it so I could give them credit. This idea forms the second analogy:

Your body is more like a chemistry lab than a bank account.

We have already observed that when we first put food in our mouths saliva is introduced into the mix to help break it down. Our stomachs add acids and other digestive juices to continue the process. Those are chemicals your body produces to make this whole system work.

Most of us think of nutrition, weight gain, and weight loss like we do a bank account. If you eat more calories and/or burn less energy, your fat cells are going to get bigger. If you eat fewer calories and/or burn more energy, your fat cells are going to get smaller. This views weight gain and loss as a mathematical calculation. This is why so many of us count calories. In fact, the calories in/calories out theory is the dominant theory today. People who even question it are thought to be anti-scientific. Well, I am in that group because I do believe the body is more like a chemistry lab than a bank account. The chemical processes at work throughout the system are extremely important, and they determine how the food we eat is ultimately used by the body.

So, think of your body as an engine designed to burn a specific mix of fuel, and think of it as a chemistry lab designed to break down and process the food we eat and the liquids we drink.

If the calories in / calories out theory is true, then 1,000 calories is 1,000 calories regardless of the food. Let’s compare 1,000 calories of two different foods – doughnuts and broccoli.

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To believe that eating 1,000 calories of these two different foods would yield the same result in the body is to ignore the chemical processes that take place to make these foods usable to the body.

Let’s compare these two foods to see what they’re made of.

The first thing to notice is that it takes a lot more broccoli by weight to get to 1,000 calories than doughnuts — 2,940 grams vs. 260 grams.

1,000 Calories Doughnuts 260 grams Broccoli 2,940 grams
Total Fat  60.00 g  10.88 g
Saturated Fat  15.00 g  1.15 g
Trans Fat  0 g  0 g
Polyunsaturated Fat  0 g  1.12 g
Monounsaturated Fat  0 g  0.32 g
Calories from Fat  540.0  97.94
Cholesterol  25.0 mg  0 mg
Sodium  475.0 mg  970.6 0 mg
Carbohydrates, Total   110.0 g  195.30 g
Fiber, total dietary 2.5 g 76.47 g
Sugars, total  50.0 g 50.0 g
Protein  10.0 g  82.94 g
Vitamin A  0 IU  18,323.68 IU
Vitamin C  6.0 mg  2,623.55 mg
Calcium  300.0 mg  1,382.36 mg
Iron  3.6 mg  21.47 mg

Without getting into the details of all of these numbers, just notice some of the differences. Fat, carbohydrates, protein, and fiber all differ considerably from one another. A quick glance at the last 4 categories also shows how different these two foods are in vitamins and minerals.  Also, while I included in the table all 16 categories I found for the doughnuts, I would need an additional 47 rows to list all of the nutrients in the broccoli.

So, 1,000 calories of these two foods provide the same number of calories, but that is where the similarity stops. What I find fascinating is what happens once you have chewed and swallowed either of these foods. In Part One we said that when the food leaves your mouth it enters the esophagus and is then moved into the stomach. When it leaves the stomach it is a very thin slurry (actually called chyme ) that enters the small intestine where much of the absorption will occur. Also included in the slurry is liquid and the digestive juices from the mouth and stomach. Your small intestine can only absorb what exists in that slurry. The doughnut slurry differs considerably from the broccoli slurry as illustrated in the table above.

The chart below provides a more visual comparison of the two slurries with regard to the main nutrients and how different these two foods really are.

Doughnut-Broccoli-Chart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you have made the decision to eat 1,000 calories of doughnuts, there is nothing you can do to change the nutritional profile of the slurry that your intestines will have to work with. Since the Nutrition Tube is literally a long tube, what enters the top exits at the bottom except for what is allowed into the body and bloodstream through an amazing process. For your body to benefit from this slurry, the nutrients have to “escape” the tube and enter into your bloodstream. Escape is the wrong word. Your digestive system actively escorts the nutrients into the bloodstream. This is the process called absorption. As we enter into a discussion of this absorption process, let me say that you can go as deep as you want to go on how this process actually works. The anatomy of the human body is remarkable and complex. I am not qualified to speak in detail about this, so I will stick to my working knowledge of how it functions. I can know as much as I need to know to understand how it impacts my health. That is my only goal. If you want to go much deeper, here is a wonderfully detailed treatment of the digestive process.

Villi

In Part One we mentioned that the walls of the small intestine are lined with villi, which are tiny peaks, or fingers, that protrude inward from the walls. I don’t think we really have the picture yet of this amazing part of the Nutrition Tube. Since the nutrients are going to be absorbed in the small intestine, just how much surface area are we talking about? I remember as a kid hearing that if Colorado’s mountains could be mashed flat with the state’s borders expanding out to accommodate all of that surface area, Colorado would be the largest state in the country. In other words, Colorado is the largest state in the USA in surface area. I have not been able to verify that, and I doubt it would be bigger than Alaska with its huge land area and large mountains. Regardless, the point is that if you count all of the surface area that exists on those mountains and hills, the state is much larger than the simple area of its length x width.

Think of your small intestine the same way. The small intestine is ranges in length from 15 feet up to 32 feet, but averages right at 23 feet. It is around 1 inch in diameter. It is coiled up in a weird and wonderful way in order for it all to fit in your abdomen. The inner lining is a layer of mucosa with the villi rising from it. There are approximately 20,000 villi for every square inch of mucosa in your small intestine. This means you have millions of villi. These villi are between 0.5 mm and 1.6 mm in length. Since they are peaks, this means there is a lot of surface area available to come in contact with your food slurry. These villi also have really tiny microvilli (depicted at the far right of the diagram below as the small fingers at the top of the absorptive cell) extending from them. If you could stretch out the small intestine, cut open the tube in a straight line lengthwise to make it a flat 23 (or so) feet long rectangle and then mash flat all villi and microvilli (while allowing the edges of the flat intestine to expand outward as you went), the total surface area would be something close to an area larger than a tennis court but smaller than a football field. Wow! That is a lot of surface area.

Villi1

By Boumphreyfr (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

As your food slurry (chyme) enters the small intestine it makes contact with these villi and the absorption process begins. Muscular contractions keep the mixture moving at a relatively slow rate through the length of the small intestine where more and more nutrients are absorbed all along they way.

Villi is the plural word for one or more. The singular word is villus. So, how does a villus absorb nutrients? The chart above shows the structure of the villus and its interconnection with the rest of the body. Let me point out a few interesting things about the diagram of the villus.

  • Artery – The red line ultimately connects to an artery
  • Vein – The blue line ultimately connects to a vein
  • Lymph duct – the yellow line is a connection to the lymphatic system

The absorptive cells use a complex chemical process to allow the nutrients pass through them and into the blood stream. Some nutrients go into the lymphatic system and get processed differently. Remember, I am claiming that your body is more like a chemistry lab than a bank account. We will see see this theme continued

Conclusion

In this article we have explored how the food we eat escapes the Nutrition Tube and gets into our blood stream for use by the body. It does it via absorption that takes place primarily in the small intestine.

In Part Three we take a brief look at the large intestine.

Once I have completed exploring the body’s biology, I will lay out exactly how I overcame years of health frustration to finally reach a better level of health and shed 50 pounds. Don’t forget the comments section below if you want to start a conversation.

Don’t miss a post in this series. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when new articles are posted. In addition, you will receive my free eBook 15 Questions to Change Your Life.

How I Lost 50 Pounds (Part One)

The Digestive System

file0001782435234 (1)I am not the only one who has experienced this. In my mind I was still an athletic 185 pound football player from my high school glory days, but the mirror mirror on the wall said I was a middle-aged man that was a full 60 pounds heavier. This increase in size brought with it the typical symptoms: fatigue, shortness of breath, inflammation, joint pain, alarming blood chemistry profiles, and regular lectures from my doctor at annual physical time. I was not happy being at that point and was a little mystified that I had allowed this to happen to me.

This topic is very controversial in our society right now, and I understand why. Many people (especially women) struggle with eating disorders born of a preoccupation with the way they look. This preoccupation has been stoked by the “ideal” body image constantly portrayed in film, television, magazines, and all types of advertising. This image is one of extremely low body fat. Thin is in. If you are not thin, you can feel serious societal pressure that something is not right with you. A certain percentage of people become so fixated on trying to achieve this ideal image that they go to extreme measures (e.g.: anorexia, bulimia, excessive exercising). These disorders have devastating consequences up to, and including, death. This is serious business.

So, my objective here is not to contribute to negative body image at all. When I decided to make some changes it was not to achieve six-pack abs or to return to my exact 17 year-old body. I decided that I did not like the way I felt or the health condition I had created. Extrapolating forward, I was concerned about what my health would be like in ten or twenty years. I did not like my trajectory. My Forward Story with regard to my health needed a serious re-write.

My objective is simply to share what I have learned in the hope that it may provide help for anyone who may be at the same point I was. The objective is for all of us to achieve good health, not for us to all look like the cover of a fashion magazine. Before I get into my personal journey and the details of what I have done, let me just state that I have lost 50 pounds. I now weigh exactly what I weighed when I was married nearly 35 years ago. I still find that hard to believe. While weight loss is the most easily measured aspect of this, please understand that the 50 pounds I have shed are really just a symptom of the good health effects that I am now enjoying.

I am convinced that anyone can do what I did. While it may not be easy, it will be a lot easier than you think in some ways and will be difficult in ways that you probably do not expect. My purpose in writing this series is not to sell a diet or to offer a quick fix. I simply hope to share what has worked for me in the belief that it will offer lasting help to some who may need it.

Have you ever looked at photos of people from the 1930s to 1950s? I have seen photos of spectators in stadiums at sporting events from that era. The surprising thing is that there are not very many obese people in those photos. At that time Americans as a whole appeared to be very fit. A photo today at a sporting event reveals that we no longer look like our grandparents did. In large numbers we have gone from fit to obese in six decades. I went from fit to obese over a period of thirty-two years.

What Caused This?

I am not a doctor or a nutritionist so it was important for me to do a lot of reading and talking with those types of people to really understand why I had added all that weight and to figure out what to do about it. If you are a doctor or nutritionist, I hope you will bear with my rather elementary grasp on these concepts and terminology. I am going to explain this in my own way from my own understanding of the way the body works. Any inaccuracies are my own. I am also aware that there are many competing theories about the best way to accomplish weight loss and higher levels of fitness. All I can testify to is what I have learned and experienced so far.

I am going to start with nutrition. I definitely believe that exercise is important, but for someone who needs to lose significant weight, exercise is very difficult. We will get to exercise later, but let’s first start with our food.

We will break this series into six parts:

  1. The Digestive System (this post)
  2. How Does Food Get Absorbed?
  3. The Role of the Large Intestine
  4. Hormones, Metabolism, and Fat Storage
  5. Food Choices & Culture
  6. My Personal Weight Loss Path (How I did it)
  7. Exercise and Activity
  8. Recommended Reading

Alimentary Canal

Your digestive system is actually a long tube. It is referred to as the alimentary canal. What you put in your mouth eventually gets eliminated at the other end after a journey of around 12 hours. What happens in this tube remains a mystery to a lot of people. It must remain a mystery no more if we plan to shed our excess weight and get fit. It is what your body does in that nearly 30 foot-long tube with the food you give it that determines your weight. The word “alimentary” refers to the function of nutrition. So, the alimentary canal is your nutrition tube. If you want nutrition, it’s got to happen inside that tube.

How Does it Work?

Blausen 0316 DigestiveSystem

Blausen.com staff. “Blausen gallery 2014”. Wikiversity Journal of Medicine. DOI:10.15347/wjm/2014.010. ISSN 20018762. (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Mouth & Esophagus

What happens to that cheeseburger when you eat it? The first thing is that it gets broken down into little bits in your mouth as you chew it, and it is mixed with the first digestive juice in the process: saliva. Not to gross you out, but when your cheeseburger leaves your mouth as you swallow, it no longer looks like it did when you held it in your hand. It has been transformed into a form of slurry that is ready for the trip down the esophagus. Your swallow takes it into your esophagus where strong muscles in the walls move it into your stomach.

Stomach

Your stomach is a muscular bag about the size of your fist. It expands to accommodate a higher volume of food when we stuff too much food in our mouths. The stomach’s purpose is to take that slurry delivered by the esophagus and really work it over. Remember, the purpose of this tube is alimentary: it is about nutrition. The stomach plays an important role in preparing the food to be able to provide nutrition. To that end, the stomach contains digestive acids and enzymes that further break the slurry down into smaller particles. Typically, food that you eat stays in the stomach about one hour. No nutritional absorption takes place in the stomach (well, apparently a few things can be absorbed here, but its mostly water, aspirin, amino acids, and some alcohol). The stomach simply prepares it for absorption at the next stop. The food then exits the stomach and is moved into the next part of the nutrition tube – the small intestine.

Small Intestine

The small intestine is the next stop for the digested food. It is a coiled tube approximately 11 feet long. Now that the mouth, esophagus, and stomach have done their jobs, it is in the small intestine that most of the nutrients available in the food are now absorbed. By absorbed, I mean those nutrients find their way outside the tube. How does this happen? The pancreas excretes fluid that neutralizes the stomach acid, and the liver secretes bile to break down the fats. The inner lining of your small intestine is not smooth like Kansas, but mountainous like Colorado. All of these small microscopic peaks (called villi) greatly increase the surface area of the small intestine for nutrient absorption. Actually, these little peaks are more worm-like than mountain-like, but you get the idea. The system is amazing in that it allows the nutrients to pass through the walls of the intestine and into the bloodstream, but it does not allow harmful waste materials to be absorbed into the body. Those materials continue down the tube. The second part of this series will deal more with how these nutrients are absorbed and where they go once they are “in.”

Large Intestine (Colon)

Your food remains in the small intestine for about an hour and a half before it moves into the large intestine, also known as the colon. The large intestine is only about 5 feet long, so compared to the small intestine (11 feet) it is not “large” in length, but only in diameter. In the large intestine the liquids are extracted and the complex carbohydrates are broken down by the action of your microbiome, which is the microscopic “good bacteria” that lives in your colon. As strange as it seems, these trillions of bacteria are very important to your health. When you take a probiotic supplement, this is the colony that you are building. I am still learning the many ways that this gut microbiome contributes to health. As it turns out, your brain is wired into your gut and there is a relationship between your brain and your gut. When all of the liquids are removed, the waste forms into a stool which is then expelled from the body.

Now that we have taken a very brief look at the alimentary canal, in Part Two we explore how nutrients actually escape the Nutrition Tube and get used by the body as fuel.