You’re doing all the things. You eat plenty of protein, and do your best to get calcium from foods. Maybe you’ve even developed a taste for sardines and natto. You should be good now, right?
Maybe not. Because just eating food (or supplements) does not necessarily mean adequate nutrition.
Putting food in your mouth and swallowing it is just the beginning. Food needs to be broken down, digested and absorbed before your body can use it.
Better digestion is the first step to stronger bones.
Table of Contents
A Few Important Things About Your Digestive System
Your digestive tract is outside your body.
I know that doesn’t make sense, because when you take a bite it looks like you’re putting food in your body. But the digestive tract is a hollow tube, open at both ends, that runs through your body. Food needs to pass through a membrane and get into the bloodstream before it’s actually inside your body.
Think of it as an airport hub, where food is flying in and waiting to get through customs before it can actually enter your country. Your immune system has the job of making sure that nothing dangerous gets through.
The first step to getting nutrients out of food is digestion.
Digestion breaks down food so that it is small enough to enter your body. Muscular movements in your digestive system grind, chop and churn your food, and enzymes chemically break down the food.
The second step to getting nutrients out of food is absorption.
Absorption is when substances move from your digestive system into your body.
There is a single layer of cells, called enterocytes, lining the inside of the digestive tract. Nutrients must be in a small enough form to pass through those cells and be absorbed.
Keep Calm and Chew Your Food
I’m sure someone has told you at least once in your life to chew your food properly. This does more than just break it into smaller pieces. The act of chewing sends messages to your digestive tract to make stomach acid, bile and enzymes.
Try chewing each bite of food at least 30 times. This is how liquified your food should be before you send it on down to your stomach.
Chewing increases your gut motility, or the muscle movements that propel food along through your digestive system. This can help prevent problems from fullness and bloating to constipation (1).
There is even some evidence coming out that chewing your food well can help you to regulate blood glucose and manage your weight (2).
Chewing is the only part of digestion you can actually control. This is your best chance to connect your food and your bones.
Stomach Acid Kickstarts Everything
You think about eating a meal, and your mouth waters. You take that first bite and maybe your eyes roll a little bit because it’s so delicious.
Hopefully, you chew your food really well, all the while thinking about how delicious it tastes and smells. Then you swallow the bite, sending it off on its digestion journey.
The first thing your food should encounter in the stomach is a lot of acid.
Stomach acid is your first line of defense against disruptive bacteria coming in on your food. Think of it as airport security. It can deactivate some harmful microbes and stop them in their tracks before they set up camp further down in your gut.
Stomach acid prepares nutrients to be digested and absorbed. It breaks proteins down into smaller pieces, and converts minerals into a form that is easy to digest. The low pH of stomach acid triggers the release of digestive enzymes.
Are you wondering whether your stomach acid is good? You can get an idea with a simple test you do at home with ingredients from your kitchen.
Without stomach acid, you don’t absorb as much protein, calcium, iron and other minerals from your food, things that are necessary for strong bones.
The Bile Acid – Vitamin Connection
The next checkpoint is in your small intestine. Your stomach has done its job of turning the food into an acidic soup called chyme. This is slowly released into your small intestine.
When chyme hits your small intestine, your body responds by releasing sodium bicarbonate from your pancreas to make it more alkaline. Along with that comes a bunch of digestive enzymes.
At the same time, your gall bladder releases bile into the mix. Bile goes after the fatty acids in your food and emulsifies them into little bubbles that your body can absorb. Certain fat soluble vitamins hitch a ride in these bubbles. This includes vitamins A, D, E and K.
Vitamins D and K, especially, have a starring role when it comes to keeping your bones healthy. You might not be getting the benefits of these vitamins if you aren’t producing enough bile.
Digestive Enzymes
I mentioned digestive enzymes earlier. These are “helper” enzymes that can break carbohydrates, proteins and fats into smaller pieces. You release some digestive enzymes from your pancreas, and you produce others in the lining of your gut.
If you have inflammation in your gut, the cells that produce digestive enzymes might not be functioning.
In a minute you’ll read about probiotics. Let’s clear this up now, they are not the same thing as digestive enzymes. Find out more about this distinction.
Digestive enzymes release the energy and micronutrients your body needs for healthy bone turnover.
Let the MMC clean up in between meals.
The Migrating Motor Complex is an amazing house cleaning service for your gut. It is a series of muscle movements that begins an hour or two after you eat. The MMC sweeps undigested bits of food and stray bacteria down through your small intestine and into your colon.
The MMC keeps your upper digestive tract free of bacteria. Just like any cleaning service, it helps digestion to run smoothly and efficiently.
The key to a good MMC is giving it time to work. When you eat anything at all, the MMC shuts down. If you graze at food a lot during the day, it may not be running at all. Try to go without eating or snacking for at least 3 hours in between your meals (3).
Read more about the Migrating Motor Complex.
The Microbiome
The key to a healthy microbiome is abundance and diversity. Most of your gut microbiome lives in your colon, or large intestine. There’s a large body of research showing that people with a more diverse microbiome have lower risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, neurological and metabolic disorders (4).
Probiotics: Getting Those Microbes Into Your Gut
In a nutshell, probiotics are live organisms that live inside another organism, and provide a benefit for their host (you). We all know that it’s healthy to have a lot of diverse microbes in our gut, but how do you get them in there in the first place? There are two ways to do it. You can eat foods that contain microbes, or you can take a probiotic supplement.
Fermented foods are the obvious good sources of microbes. However, unprocessed fruits and vegetables have their own microbiome, which gets transferred to you when you consume them. It’s a great reason to eat whole, plant-based foods.
Is it okay to just grab a probiotic supplement off the shelf? I believe probiotic supplements should be tailored to what you are trying to achieve with your health. There are a few products that are specfically tailored to bone health. You can read about them in “Can Probiotics Strengthen Your Bones?“
Prebiotic Plant Fibers That Feed Your Microbiome
To encourage different types of microbes to grow, you need to feed them with a lot of different plant fibers. Prebiotics are foods you eat that you can’t fully digest, so they end up feeding the microbes in your gut. Here is a list of prebiotic foods to nurture your gut microbes:
- acacia fiber
- artichoke
- asparagus
- apples
- barley
- mushrooms
- onions
- psyllium
- seaweed
- whole grain oats
- whole wheat
- green bananas
- banana peel (Yes, you can actually throw a little piece of banana peel into a smoothie.)
- lentils
- plantain
- rolled oats
- potatoes or rice which have been cooked, and then cooled (think leftover rice or potato salad.)
Read more about the how fiber feeds your microbiome.
How Your Microbiome Benefits Your Bones
- Produces butyrate, a short chain fatty acid that can lower inflammation in your body
- Provides food and fuel to keep the cells of your gut lining strong, for better digestion
- Breaks down phytate and oxalate to free up minerals from your food
- Trains your immune system to keep the bad guys out of your body
- Breaks down polyphenols to produce antioxidants and anti-inflammatory substances
Frailty and Your Microbiome
A fascinating new study followed more than 3,000 women between the ages of 75 and 80 for nearly eight years. Researchers looked at the bacteria living in their intestines and compared them with measures of frailty, falls, hip fractures, and mortality.
Here’s what they found:
Women with a more diverse, healthier gut microbiome were less likely to be frail. They also had a lower risk of falls, hip fractures, and death over the course of the study.
On the other hand, women with less microbial diversity were more likely to have poorer physical function, weaker grip strength, slower walking speed, more inflammation, and a higher risk of serious injuries from falls (5).
This study suggests that feeding a healthy gut microbiome may be one important way to support healthy bones.
Transit Time and Elimination
Your food isn’t quite done with its journey through the digestive system. Lots of nutrients managed to make it into your body, and a lot more got consumed by gut microbes. But there’s some stuff left that needs to be eliminated.
Along with all the residue of fibers and substances that are left, there are some things that your body tagged for removal. Excess amounts of hormones such as estrogen are eliminated through your gut. You get rid of extra cholesterol through your gut. A lot of toxins also make their way out of your body through this route.
Ideally, it will take between 12 and 24 hours after you eat food for it to come out the other end. This is called transit time.
If transit time gets slowed up, you can actually reabsorb things that should have been removed. Then these substances have to go back to the liver and get re-tagged and sent through the gut again.
It’s more efficient to get rid of them the first time. Your gut needs enough time to absorb all the nutrients that it needs, but not enough time for toxic substances to get absorbed back into your body.
There are a lot of ways to improve transit time, which is a hot topic in my programs. Read about some teas that help with constipation.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot going on between when you swallow a bite of food and when you are actually able to use that food in your body. Just putting food or supplement into your stomach doesn’t guarantee you get the nutrients.
You need stomach acid, bile acids, digestive enzymes, a healthy microbiome and a good transit time to really get the benefits of your healthy diet and supplement regimen.
When I work with clients to support healthier bones, we start with digestion to make sure they are getting the benefits of that nutritious food.
Want to learn more? Just drop me a comment below.