By Elena Voropay

Train Your Guts For Bigger Muscles 

Caring for the health of your body, and ultimately your muscles, means getting the most out of your diet and timepiecing the nutrient content of everything that bypasses your lips. Meticulous planning and measuring of meals, snacks, drinks, shakes, pills and powders is a worthless effort if this stuff doesn't get properly digested, absorbed and used by the receptive cells in your digestive tract. You can down hundreds of dollars worth of food and supplements every month and still not see the promised results you work so hard for in the gym. Blaming the advertising companies for false promotion of their products that don't build your muscles and burn fat while you sleep is not going to help. You have to make everything you eat highly bioavailable to all 100 000 000 000 000 cells of your body.

So, before you can get the energizing effects of your food, drinks or supplements, they must be changed into smaller molecules of nutrients, then be absorbed into the blood and carried to cells throughout the body.

Nutrient Delivery

So, you gulped your meal, rejoicing in all the nutritious healthy benefits you are giving to your starved muscles and brain. All you know at this point is that it feels good, and hopefully you are not suffering from dreadful indigestion, revolting gas or any other hideous attacks of your digestive tract. The mixture of food you have manufactured in your mouth now swims down the elongated pipe specifically made for food called oesophagus. That chewed up material, also known as bolus, arrives in your stomach and stays there for up to four hours being ground and churned, mixed with acid and enzymes until it becomes a semiliquid mass called chyme. Now your food, or whatever it has become, takes off on its adventurous journey to its final destination through the mucous-lined six meters of intestines.

These have so many different cells all responsible for various functions that anatomists separated one long tube of digestive tract into specific regions depending on what kind of work each part does and what kind of stuff it absorbs. Liver and the pancreas, nerves and blood do their bit of work to produce juices that reach the intestine through small tubes. Since the absorption of different nutrients takes place in different parts of your digestive tract, the chyme must be moved along with certain speed to allow the receptive cells to suck up the energy. The mechanism is extremely complex and starts with the muscle work of your digestive tract.

That's right, muscles, muscles, and more muscles. If you thought of muscles only in relation to the superficial bulk you see in the gym, and hopefully in the mirror with you standing in front, you have to change your perspective of the human body. Muscles are everywhere, and some of the most important ones are the ones you don't see – right inside of you. That's right, the powerful force of your stomach and intestinal muscles move the food like an ocean waive. And just like your airplane-huge lats, unless these muscle are properly trained, they can't pull or push a thing.

Running to the toilet too often? You are literally passing all the nourishing out of your system. Feeling plugged up and bloated longer than you would wish? The beneficial wholesome nutrients can ferment into something toxic minus the energy. These are obvious effects of poor digestion and absorption. But even if you don't suffer from any of the above, you still might be lacking in the anticipated nutrient delivery. Why? Because of what you take in and when. These are indeed the most overlooked factors that inhibit penetration of your bank of supplements through to your muscle cells. Break Down the Nutrients Without Breaking the Bank

Considering the recommendations for taking a huge abundance of so many nutrients, the eating endeavour may come heavy on your body, time and wallet. Even if you manage to plan a sort of healthy six meals a day with protein, carbs, good fats, topped with a multi-vitamin-mineral pill (or a handful of these), chances are that you will only absorb and process less than half of that. Everything has its own inhibitors that prevents absorption and promoters that stimulates the nutrient delivery. Even certain nutrient-dense components may decrease the penetration of other important nutrients competing for the limiting space of the receptive cells of your intestines. The intricate integration of food and supplements is truly a mind-bogglening task, so keeping the formula simple, here are a few things to watch for when you are planning you diet.

Factors that increase bioavailability of most nutrients:

Small frequent doses taken throughout the day.

Unless you are a hopeless fanatic of food and nutrient combining, you wouldn't eat five chicken breasts for breakfast, a potful of pasta for lunch, the entire salad bar for mid-afternoon snack and finish with half a gallon of milk for dinner. Well, your body wouldn't enjoy processing a bunch of the same stuff either. It just doesn't have the ability or the mechanism to absorb a 100 percent of any nutrient in any one sitting, even if you gobble down megadozes . So, give your gastrointestinal tract a little break simply by sparing the intake of food and supplements throughout the day. Sufficient stomach acidity.

Just like your in-laws, if heartburn reminds you of the food you eat more often than you ever want, you still might have a stomach acid deficiency. Commonly associated with aging, poor production of stomach acid causes naughty digestion and chronic malabsorption of protein and most vitamins and minerals. The gland cells on inside surface of the stomach secrete about two litres of hydrochloric acid (HCl), mucus and other substances every day. However, overburdening your stomach with large meals, rushing, or gorging on protein or dairy may inhibit sufficient production of HCL causing wind, bloating, and chronic melabsorption. Anti-acids may be your worst offenders in that case sending you on a downward spiral of chronic heartburn and insufficient stomach acid production. Good liver and gallbladder function with adequate bile secretion.

The bile is stored between meals in the gallbladder and squeezed out into the intestine after food reaches the receptive cells in the intestinal tract. Just like detergents dissolve grease from your frying pan, the bile acids dissolve the fat into the watery contents of the intestine making it absorbable. But the work of the liver doesn't stop there as this organ is paramount in processing of all the nutrients and drugs, detoxifying toxins and poisons, filtering alcohol and chemicals. Any diseases of the liver will have a truly terrible impact on all of your health, and, of course, on nutrient delivery system.

Factors that inhibit bioavailability of most nutrients:

Fibrous grains, veggies and everything bulky in the stomach.

Oxalates and phytic acid or phytate are naturally forming component found in plant fiber and is found in large amounts in the bran of most seeds and grains and also vegetables. Being very beneficial to health as an antioxidant, it has a downside of inhibiting the absorption of most minerals and vitamins. It is still a great idea to have plenty of fiber in the diet, and most people don't get enough. But remember that with all the positive intentions of promoting digestion and protecting your cells from the major free radical damage caused by all of your gym work, you may simply pee out a lot of the good stuff you take in if you eat fibrous foods with your supplements. Additionally, all the vitamins and minerals naturally present in plant foods are not as easily absorbable.

Health-protecting and cancer-fighting components, such as tannins.

Tannins found in tea, coffee and wine are plant polyphenols may boast for their anti-oxidant activity, but they also minimize the potential benefits of other nutrients by preventing proper penetration through the intestinal lining. You lean and mean iron-loaded steak may become mineral-free when accompanied by a glass of wine. And forget the vitamin C content from tea – the amount you get is so small, it's like drinking oxygenated water to get air into your system. But by all means, praise your pot of java, handful of nuts, drink up on a wine-tasting tour and sip a hot cup of tea with a thick and rich slice of cake (or whatever bodybuilder-friendly imitation of it you choose) to protect yourself from free-radical damage. After all, scientists have only started discovering all the praiseworthy healthy properties of the nature's gifts. Just remember timing of your supplements – a few hours before or after.

Extremely large meals.

Overloaded stomach cannot stimulate the production of sufficient amounts of digestive acids and enzymes, so the undigested food passes into the intestines where it is not properly absorbed and used by all the hungry cells in the body. So, besides keeping your blood sugar levels moderate, giving you energy whenever you need, stimulating metabolism and burning that soft 6-pack coverage, small frequent meals also stimulate the much needed absorption of the nutrients you are trying so hard to deliver.