Best Digestive Enzyme Expert Reviews of Digestive Products
Even though it’s widely viewed as a bad thing, fats are still needed for health and nutrition. Without fats, the good kind, the body doesn’t get all the nutrients it needs and side effects like low energy levels along with weaker immune system problems will persist. Numerous health problems are associated with impaired fat digestion.
According to several studies, fat molecules are a rich source of energy for your body. Many of your organs participate in the digestion of fatty foods. In most cases, fatty foods are easily digested. However, certain medical conditions may impair your body’s ability to break down fat, causing health complications that range from mild to severe.
If you are unable to properly digest fatty foods, you may want to look to your pancreas and not only your gallbladder. Signs of pancreatic enzyme deficiency or inactivity include: Bloating or cramping pain after meals, Loose, greasy, foul-smelling stools, deficiency in fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Research tells us that pancreatic enzymes do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to breaking down fats. If you are deficient in pancreatic enzymes or if they are inactive, you may have trouble digesting fats.
The enzyme responsible for digesting fats is lipase. Lipase has a short life in the small intestine and is sensitive to its environment. Besides having a short life, if the small intestine is too acidic, lipase does not do the job it was designed to do.
Your pancreas makes the majority of lipase, but some also comes from your mouth and stomach. When you eat a fatty meal, stomach emptying slows and a small amount of fat is digested by gastric lipase in your stomach. This is especially true of certain types of triglycerides, such as those found in butter.
Your liver produces bile, which is stored in your gallbladder — when fat arrives in the small intestine, the gallbladder contracts and releases bile. Bile helps emulsify the fat, making it more accessible to digestion by pancreatic lipase. Pancreatic lipase digests the triglycerides into free fatty acids and monoglycerides, which your small intestine absorbs.
Fats require special digestive action before absorption because the end products must be carried in a water medium (blood and lymph) in which fats are not soluble. Lipase is the primary digestant used to split fats into fatty acids and glycerol. Although little actual fat digestion occurs in the stomach, gastric lipase does digest already emulsified fats such as in egg yolk and cream.
Emulsification is the real key to the proper digestion of fats. The large fat molecule presents comparatively small surfaces for the lipase to work on, so the process of emulsification by the action of bile produced by the liver is necessary. Bile breaks down the large fat molecule to tiny droplets which provide lipase with an enormously increased surface to work on. This action takes place in the small intestine and the lipase involved here is a part of the pancreatic secretion.
