If we’re going to get to the bottom of how liquids might affect digestion, we’ll first need to take a crash course in the normal digestive process.
Digestion begins with chewing. As soon as you start to chew, your salivary glands produce saliva, which contains enzymes that break down your food. Saliva also softens your food, which enables smooth travel for your food down your esophagus and into your stomach.
Inside your stomach, food is mixed with gastric fluids, an acid that breaks it down further to produce a thick liquid called chyme. Chyme is then mixed with digestive enzymes from the pancreas and bile acid from the liver once it travels to the small intestine.
This whole process serves to prepare the nutrients in your food for absorption into your bloodstream. Once inside the bloodstream, nutrients are distributed throughout the body. The digestion process ends when the leftovers leave your body.
And if you haven’t been drinking enough water, you may suffer from constipation that will… prolong the digestion process.
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The Arguments for Avoiding Liquids with Meals
Here are the three arguments you’re most likely to run into when someone claims that liquids are bad for your digestion – and why they’re totally wrong.
Saliva is Changed by Liquids
People rallying against drinking liquids with your meals have argued that drinking alcoholic or generally acidic drinks actually dries up saliva, which makes it more difficult for the body to digest food.
There is a hint of truth to this. Alcohol decreases the flow of saliva by 10 to 15 percent per unit of alcohol. This mainly refers to hard liquors, though, and not the alcohol contents of liquids like beer and wine.
But as this is only a minor change in saliva output – and hard to reach unless you’re eating your meal with a bottle of vodka – you don’t have anything to worry about.
This argument is based on the idea that when you drink water, the stomach acid becomes too weak to break down your foods.
This would imply that the human digestive system was unable to change its secretions based on the consistency of each meal.
And that’s patently false. Drinking water in reasonable amounts with your meals does not dilute stomach acid and digestive enzymes.
Fluids Speed Up Digestion
The idea is that fluids increase the speed at which solid foods leave the stomach, which reduces the meal’s contact time with stomach acid and digestive enzymes.
However, a study analyzing the stomach’s emptying speed found that while liquids do pass through the digestive system faster than solids, they have no effect on the digestion speed of solids.
How Liquids Can Improve Digestion
Liquids actually aid in digestion in quite a few ways.
First of all, liquids make swallowing dry or tough foods much easier.
Liquids can help break down larger chunks of food, which makes it easier for them to travel through the digestive tract. Liquids – particularly water – act as a natural lubricant for your intestinal walls and can push food along smoothly, which prevents bloating and constipation.
On top of all this, your stomach actually secretes water along with gastric acid and other digestive enzymes. Without water, these enzymes would not function properly.
In other words, liquids – water, specifically – are necessary for proper digestion and should be consumed with your meals. But improving digestion isn’t all water can do for your body when you pair it with your meals.
Final Thoughts
It simply wouldn’t make any sense if our bodies had evolved to perform poorly when liquids were used to wash down solid foods.
Liquids are a part of your diet that should not be forgotten – especially during mealtimes.
What’s your take on drinking water with meals? Have anything else you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments below!
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Many companies use shipping and handling fees to increase their profit margins, but here at Legion, we hate profits, so our shipping is free!
Okay, so we do dig on profits, but we also go in for happy customers, and free shipping works like gangbusters. So, if you live in the UK or Canada, your order ships free when it’s over $99.
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We just . . . wait for it . . . give you your money back. No returns. No forms. No nonsense. Holy moo cows.
That means you can say “yes” now and decide later. You really have nothing to lose.
Free Worldwide Shipping & Returns
Many companies use shipping and handling fees to increase their profit margins, but here at Legion, we hate profits, so our shipping is free!
Okay, so we do dig on profits, but we also go in for happy customers, and free shipping works like gangbusters. So, if you’re outside the USA, your order ships free when it’s over $199.
Why the restriction on international orders? Unfortunately, shipping abroad is very expensive, and if we didn’t require a minimum order size, we’d lose a lot of money. But! We're also hustling to improve our international logistics and will be passing our savings along to our international customers.
Also, if you don’t absolutely love our stuff for whatever reason, we don’t request you deliver it to a PO box in the Gobi Desert by carrier pigeon.
We just . . . wait for it . . . give you your money back. No returns. No forms. No nonsense. Holy moo cows.
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