You Need Water to Process Food

  How drinking water helps your digestive system and helps fight COVID-19. Your digestive system is important to your survival. Your body needs nutrients to survive. You need water to be able to produce enough saliva and stomach acid to process the food you eat as well as carry it through the intestines and remove the waste.

  Dehydration can cause serious problems to your digestive system. Drinking water helps keep your stomach and digestive system healthy. The saliva your mouth produces every time you chew is the first step in the digestion process. Saliva helps make food wet and easier to swallow, as well as beginning to digest some starches. Saliva is 98% water. So drinking water is important to help your body produce enough saliva.

  A lot of people think that acid reflux is when your stomach has too much stomach acid and actually the opposite is true. Acid reflux is caused by too little stomach acid. When you're dehydrated, your body doesn't have enough water to make enough stomach acid, which makes it harder for it to digest food.

  If you have food in your stomach and not enough stomach acid to process it, it will send it back up into your throat. When it sends the food up, some of the stomach acid will go with the food causing acid reflux. To demonstrate this we have a glass jar with food and colored water to represent stomach acid. The Jar holds 32 ounces, which is about the size of your stomach with food in it.

  In this first jar, you can see we have the food and we have plenty of stomach acid to process it. In this second photo you can see the jar has food in it but a much lower level of stomach acid which doesn't even cover the amount of the food so it's going to have a much harder time processing it.

  Drinking enough water so your body can produce enough stomach acid will help your digestive system process food and help you avoid acid reflux.

  75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated, which can cause damage throughout the digestive system. Drinking water to stay hydrated can help heal your digestive system.

  I talked with a person who after four months of drinking water to help keep their body hydrated and help their digestive system heal, were able to eat things that they couldn't before, including an increased tolerance for gluten.

  Your body needs water to help your intestines absorb nutrients and deliver them to the rest of your body. Water helps the mucosal lining and villi in your small intestine absorb nutrients. Without water, the mucus and villi lining your small intestine can be damaged.

  Water is also needed to create blood to carry the nutrients throughout your body. Your digestive system needs water to get rid of waste, which leaves your body as pee or poop. Your kidneys need water to help them process waste and toxins and remove them from your body when you pee.

  Your intestines need water to help create a soft stool or turd that can easily pass out of your body. When you're dehydrated there is not enough water so the stool is dry and hard and harder to pass. Drinking water is an easy way to help keep your digestive system healthy.