The Domino Effect, Part 1: What the heck is the Digestive Domino Track?

I don’t know if kids these days still set up domino tracks (gauging by my own, I’m gonna guess no), but being an 80s baby, we definitely did. And if you know anything about this tedious process, you know that each domino must be set up just right in order for the whole track to fall down in the most wonderful, graceful, and satisfying way. 

If one domino is off just a smidge though, it can halt the entire cascade. 

The digestive system works in a very similar fashion. There is an intricate connection between the various components of the digestive system, and the succession of events that occurs to get your food from point A to point B requires them all to work together. 

Each step influences the next, creating a chain reaction of events that is essential for proper digestion and nutrient absorption… and ultimately for your overall health and well-being. Every symptom or condition you have can be traced back, at least in part, to your gut. 

Think about it this way:  every single cell in your body is made up of the nutrients you consume, and every single process that occurs in your body is also fueled by those nutrients. It’s amazing how disconnected we get from that fact! We really are what we eat – except, more accurately, we are what we absorb. When you stop to really consider this, you start to understand why this process is fundamental to everything else and why it’s square one when we’re optimizing anything in the body.  

Too often, we approach digestive issues as isolated problems, focusing on individual symptoms without considering the bigger picture. Not only do we view what’s happening in the gut as separate from the rest of the body, but we tend to view singular digestive symptoms in a vacuum as well. 

The truth is that none of these things is separate, and by understanding the digestive domino track, we can begin to take a root cause approach to our health issues. 

In the next posts in this series, we’ll explore specific components of the digestive domino track in more detail. For each domino in the track, we’ll talk about:

• Its role in the digestive process
• What happens when it’s “off” (i.e. your symptoms!)
• And what we can do to get it back “in line”

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll start with the master conductor of the orchestra: the brain and nervous system.