RBS FITNESS MYTH #4:

"We don't digest food well and our GI needs special foods or supplements to accommodate the deficiency"

Ok that title may have been a little excessive and I could have been a little more concise with it, but it still drives the point home I believe. Also, I write these whenever I hear, think, or read about so much nonsense that still surrounds fitness culture, especially the mainstream that strongly confuses people everywhere. There are different interpretations of this message floating around, but the basic thought process here for many is that food just somehow manages to bypass our naturally brilliant digestive design, so we can't get the energy or proper nutrition we continuously need. Not only is this belief absolutely absurd, but it's just simply wrong from an extremely simple scientific standpoint.

Approximately 20 years ago, Lyle Mcdonald cited research that supported a collective digestive efficiency of 95-98% depending on the macronutrient in question. The rest of it will obviously be passed through in some form, but please recognize that whole foods or partially broken food sources do not just sit in the stomach or small intestine for days or weeks and rot as they would since there is no preservation strategy present in the gut. We would be so backed up that we would implode eventually.

In closing, we do have a relatively slow rate of peristaltic movement or the snakelike motion that is working to pass food through steadily and this can last for quite a few hours. Eventually though, specific enzymes or protein carriers will break down and deliver the food in into simpler and individual components that can then be utilized in energy pathways. Below is an overly simplistic diagram, that I'm confident most will scoff at, but you need to still consider that many people don't know the basic foundations of human nutrition if you sit down and really talk to them. Unfortunately, in this case, this type of information warrants addressing just to get everyone caught up to speed.