Dr. Tabatha Barber explains that digestion starts in the brain and requires the parasympathetic nervous system to activate. Eating on the go keeps your body in stress mode, which impairs your stomach's ability to break down protein and your intestines' ability to absorb nutrients.
Digestion starts in the brain, and really thinking about it from that perspective, we need to literally be on the right side of our autonomic nervous system, which is the parasympathetic rest and repose. But most of us are, and this is why my family always said grace, like that was part of what we did before dinner. We would all sit down, we would take a couple deep breaths, say grace, and then eat. But for a lot of women, busy women, entrepreneurial women, any woman, We're eating in our car, we're eating standing up, we're eating off our kids' plates. And so we're literally not optimizing our digestion from that perspective, which means we're not gonna break down our protein in our stomach. There won't be an ability to break it down into amino acids. It means in the small intestine, you're probably not gonna be able to absorb and assimilate nutrients the way that you optimally should.
