Food for thought

Do you eat what you should?  or do you eat what you want?
Can you combine the two?
Petra Brockmann offers some ‘food for thought’ in her latest ‘Health Corner’

Dear readers,

In this and the next couple of articles, I would like to share with you some thoughts on food and thus provide you with some food for thought.

Most of us have heard or read somewhere that it is good for us if we don’t eat after six p.m., especially if we strive to lose some weight. The background is this: All organs in our body have certain times when they are at the height of their activity, while their activitiy decreases in the hours after this peak. These times are the same for every body and they are reflected in the so-called "organ clock". The three main organs involved in digestion – stomach, small and large intestine – also work according to this clock, and their timing is the following:

The peak of activity for our stomach lies between seven and nine in the morning, the peak for our small intestine between one and three p.m., and the peak for our large intestine between five and seven in the morning.

The least active period is always exactly twelve hours after the peak, meaning that our stomach and small intestines do not really work much anymore in the evening and at night.

Hence it is good to have eaten most, ideally all, of what we eat in a day before the evening.

We have to keep in mind, of course, that different foods take different periods of time to pass through the digestive system. As a general rule, fatty foods take longer than carbohydrates, for example. Potatoes, pasta and brown bread remain in the stomach for two to three hours before they pass into the small intestine, while white bread, boiled fish and rice take one to two hours. Pulses and fatty meat stay in the stomach the longest, around six hours, while boiled vegetables only stay there for two to three hours. Fried beefsteak and green beans take around four to six hours, boiled chicken and whole-meal bread ("Vollkornbrot") take around three to four hours to be processed in the stomach before being passed on to the small intestine.

Throughout the process of digestion our system extracts the nutritive elements from the food that we eat. If we eat a complete hot meal between six and seven in the evening, our digestive system processeses what we have eaten only very slowly. Most of the food will simply remain in our digestive tract until the next morning and in the meantime starts to decompose rather than being digested. So, instead of getting the full benefit from what we have eaten, we get a typical feeling of "Oh dear, I think I have eaten too much too late".

I realize that a "proper breakfast" (and I leave the definition of "proper" up to you) is not everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak. Some people cannot face any food at all until around lunchtime. Equally, it is often difficult nowadays – for a variety of reasons – to have a warm meal in the middle of the day.

Nonetheless, if you suffer from digestive problems, from lack of energy or from loss of sleep, it might be worth investigating whether your eating habits might be in any way connected to that problem.

Personally, I am not a great believer in diets and strict rules as far as what we eat is concerned. I think that certain given circumstances should be taken into consideration – the "organ clock", for example, is the same for every organism. Also, it is important to have a balanced diet – carbohdydrates, fat, vegetables, meat, pulses, rice, fish, fruit, sweets – the lot. It is certainly of great help to find a balance, too, between personal preferences (some people simply don’t like meat, or fish, or fresh fruit) and what is "sensible" to eat. Individuality, here, too, is of paramount importance – finding a diet that suits the individual and their needs best. Food and eating should be one of the enjoyable things in life, not a routine that someone subjects themselves to in order to be reasonable and sensible. From my experience and that of many of my clients, the fact that we enjoy what we eat is at least as important as the fact that we eat sensibly.

 

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