-: So from an Eastern perspective,
the process of digestion is actually fairly similar
to what we talk about in the west.
Although given the era several millennia,
7,000 years ago, millennia ago,
we were not talking about things at a very granular level.
What we were talking about was the process of you eat food,
it goes into your stomach
your spleen helps rotten and ripen it process it.
It moves, if you look down underneath the spleen,
it moves into the small intestine.
They associated the small intestine
with having the ability to separate
the clear from the turbid.
And effectively what that meant was,
Hey, your food's got good stuff
and your food's got bad stuff.
We assume that your body is going to take the good stuff
and put it into the cells
and it's gonna push the bad stuff out the other end.
Oh, got it that's the stuff
that comes out the rectum, understood.
Now, where does it send that clear stuff?
Well, it sends the clear stuff to all the organs.
It powers the lungs, so you breathe.
It pumps the blood through the heart.
It helps the store,
you know, it creates to help the spleen make the blood,
it helps the liver hold the blood, right?
And it powers the kidney.
So effectively you have this like very
C.S. Lewis, steam engine thing working here
where it's like coal.
We throw the coal into the fire, the fire burns,
it gets the pistons moving and we move down the tracks.
Kind of pretty much.
Yeah, you eat the food, it eats the food, it breaks it down,
it takes the bad stuff down out the back shoot there,
it moves the good stuff to all the organs
so they can do like their, you know, big musical montage
of all their actions they do every day. Right?
Okay. The lung now has energy so it can take air
and oxygenate the blood that was made by the spleen.
That's circulated by the heart, that's held by the liver.
Cool. That makes sense.
That's how we power the machine. Okay?
And that makes sense as the process of creating Qi.
The process of creating blood
and the process of circulating those.
Which is really what the process of digestion was
in the east. Okay?
But they also broke this down even further.
And part of the reason I wanna break this down
for you guys is there's some really cool
biomedical information we can ascertain from.
The Yellow Emperor's Imperial Classic.
And this is also stuff that can be very helpful to us
in the gym.
Also note,
we over-simplify, if we say,
when you see spleen, you think digestion.
Sure, digestion was part of it.
We talked about the fact that rottens and ripen.
It's like a little trash panda. Okay?
It's like the trash panda of the body.
Oh, I saw one of those by the way, big one in the alley.
I'm a big fan of those,
but I think about them as the spleen,
cause they kind of break down all the food.
But the spleen does more than simply digest. Okay?
So yeah, it has an effect on the spleen phase
has an effect on the organ.
Sure. That makes sense.
It's generated in the heart. That's interesting.
Oh, here's a couple other ones
that are gonna be interesting.
It governs the muscle.
In fact, there's a lot of discussion
about how you regenerate and generate flesh
via the spleen phase.
Okay. So for any of you that who wanna get more bigger,
right? This is your phase, right?
And then it's also reflected in the mouth in the lip.
We're gonna use that to our advantage later. Okay?
So, when we think about this from our Eastern perspective,
we talk about things like Yin, Yang and Qi. Okay?
And again, that means very little to us
or it does to me anyway.
But if we think about the process of the spleen phase
in its association with digestion, that's helpful.
If we also considered the yin of spleen splinting in
to mean aldosterone and things like vitamin A,
it also would help.
I think it would also help to think about Yang
as being atrial natriuretic peptide or ANP,
And also for spleen Qi to be Ghrelin. Okay?
So what do we wanna take away from this?
Well, this phase itself has substantial involvement
with fluid metabolism. Okay?
And plasma volume. So things like blood pressure.
It also has a pretty strong involvement,
not only with hormonal levels, but also.
Think about your body temperature and your appetite.
We see things like ANP, ghrelin, aldosterone,
vitamin A, you're thinking about the color of lips
and tongue.
You're thinking about the metabolism of water
and fluid retention.
You're thinking about blood volume
and therefore blood pressure.
We're thinking about body temperature control, right?
We're thinking about for men and women,
both estrogen and testosterone.
And of course, how hungry are you? Right?
So all of these things make sense
because this is how we describe things in the spleen phase
in Eastern medicine.
We think about edema or water retention.
We think about orthostatic hypertension,
standing up and getting a little dizzy
because your Spleen Yang has dropped. Right?
Now, go back and we think about this.
If you have a yin and yang outbalance
and you have an excessive
imbalance there with a Yin and Yang
and you see blood volume drop through aldosterone,
that can support the reason we have
orthostatic hypertension. Okay?
What does that mean?
Well, it means that perhaps we either need
to increase some tension, produce some more blood, right?
We need to support the water balance that way
and now we're gonna have ways in which we can evaluate that.
All right. So we're looking at things like edema,
excessive water retention, pale skin.
Well, I'm screwed,
pale tongue.
So we don't just mean how much melanin you have,
we mean in relative nature. Okay?
Everyone can look pale for themselves.
Swollen tongue or scalloping.
Okay. So on the side of the tongue, that scalloping
is, can be assigned of the qi deficiency as well
specifically in the spleen.
Okay. And then we're looking at things like pale lips.
We'll talk about that more and why.
Cold body temperature.
Cold all the time.
Okay. Now this is different than saying,
I just have Raynaud's or cold hand and feet. All right.
So if your mother-in-law's ever gripped you
with her ice mints, maybe this is
an unusually specific example to me.
But if your mother-in-law has ever gripped you very hard
with a cold hand,
like ice cold glove mint like Klondike canned,
and that's the only part in their body that's cold,
that's more of a Raynaud's situation.
And we would use something called Si Ni San for that,
which can help improve blood flow to the micro vessel.
That's different.
This is when you're you get in the Ford Explorer
of the young lady you're dating and it's 80 degrees outside
and you hop in and you're wearing a t-shirt and a tank top
or in Cody's case, no tank top.
And she's got the heat set at 85 and it's got a hoodie on
and looks like Eminem right?
You're like, what is happening with you?
It's like, I'm cold, aren't you cold?
And I'm like, oh, it's 80 what's wrong with you?
Well, this is what's wrong with her. Okay?
She's having regulation issues of the temperature
and it can be because of the spleen phase.
Okay. So this is where we start to look at things
like ANP. Okay?
I can obviously be exaggerating.
She may drive something that is not a Ford Explorer
that's okay, too.
But it really doesn't matter what vehicle she's driving.
What the important thing here is,
we all know that person in your life who's like,
I'm cold, I'm cold. It's cold. It's drafty. I'm cold.
You're like, I don't know.
Cause you know, Bob and my uncle over there
are wearing shorts and everything's fine for them.
You know, like what's the difference?
Well, the difference is probably in this phase,
may be in this phase and so maybe we should evaluate this.
Okay.
Right. Well, let's talk about how and why.
Okay. So when we talk about the atrial natriuretic peptide,
this is what we refer to as the warming mechanism.
This is a signaling molecule
that's intimately involved in the warming process.
This is a massive and important function of ANP.
And this is also something classically that we evaluate
in Spleen Yang deficiency.
Thus meaning, if you have a deficiency of Spleen Yang,
you can end up with cold body, right?
And that cold person, not emotionally, just physically.
And perhaps it's because they have ANP drop
and as we use some of these herbal formulas
to help boost that Spleen Yang,
we hopefully will be elevating the temperature
of their body, or at least their perception
of their temperature.
And that can be a result of regulating ANP okay.
Also plays a role in salivary secretion.
So you get that modulation of salivary secretion.
So if you get somebody that looks like a Basset hound,
right? They're just slobbering all over the place,
or perhaps the really dry,
it could be a sign that this is dysregulated as well. Okay?
For women, their estrogen receptors increase ANP.
So it's estrogen dependent for males.
It's testosterone dependent.
Cool. So body temperature, salivary control,
the stuff on there about the estrogen and testosterone
is more for your knowledge and support
that this is more, this means more than simply,
why are you cold all the time and why are you drooling
or not.
But this is more about it's, it's part of a web
and it's really important for us
especially in this phase where we're trying to create
hypertrophic gains. Okay?
So when we think of Spleen Yang,
we should think of ANP. All right?
Now, as we move to Spleen Yin,
which should be the opposite of Yang in kind of in a way,
we're gonna look at this as aldosterone and vitamin A.
So, Yin, an excessive Yin tends to cool the body.
So both held aldosterone and retinoic acid
have this ability to inhibit heat generation in the body.
So if someone's running too hot,
we might say that they are Yin deficiently heated, okay.
Or a condition that's known as Yin deficiency heat.
And in this case, we could look at this and go,
oh, they're lacking aldosterone.
Lack of aldosterone can inhibit the regulation of heat
or the cooling of the body. Okay?
Well, aldosterone can also lead to dry mouth.
So if you're hot, with dry mouth,
well, maybe you need a little more aldosterone in your life.
Okay.
What can help us with that? Salt.
Salt can help help us with that. All right.
So for all you people who are, not you people,
not you people, you're not doing this.
salt your food.
Let's do that.
Everything will work out. Okay?
In terms of our
ability to regulate our blood pressure,
we can understand why and how this would be important
because not only are we regulating fluid in the mouth,
we're also regulating fluid at the blood volume level.
Okay. So that's gonna impact not the size of the tube.
Right? But rather the amount of water that's in it,
the fluid that's in it.
So if the pressure that we have in our vessels
comes from the diameter of the vessel
and the amount of volume we have in there.
Well, if we have a reduction of the volume,
we can have a reduction of the pressure.
Thus, we can run into situations
where we end up into that orthostatic hypertension.
So this can help us with blood pressure regulation
and how we directly correlate those signs and symptoms
back to what may be going on with the person.
Okay. And then of course, our big, bad boy, right?
We've already talked about this a little bit.
How hungry are you? Okay.
This one's important because ghrelin
is what we think of the, as the hunger hormone, right?
I mean, in a way it's a peptide
that regulates the distribution and consumption of energy.
And as we elevate ghrelin,
we can be elevating our hunger. Okay.
If somebody has hunger that drops, it might be said then
that they've had ghrelin that drops.
And if spleen, she is ghrelin,
if we see a deficiency in Spleen Qi,
we might see also a deficiency in appetite.
Which is why it becomes important
for us to evaluate that as a question. Okay.
So someone who lacks interest in appetite,
they food, they're disinterested in.
Now, there are people who just don't really care about food.
That is not this.
This is the person who's like,
yeah, I have a really good appetite usually,
but I'm just not interested in food.
Nothing sounds good is what you might hear them say, okay.
Ghrelin and as well as the ANP, they all play a role.
In fact, the ANP can really manifest in the lip.
So can, so too can their ghrelin.
We also see that ghrelin elevates as testosterone elevates.
And as we mentioned in our opening salvo
into kind of frame of reference,
this is one of the examples we use. It's an important one.
So we're gonna repeat,
it might be why that was selected in the first place.
But as you see, analogs of things like GHRP,
the growth hormone releasing peptides,
you can see an elevation in hunger.
And effectively this would be why,
this would be support for why that mechanically happens.
Is that we're driving ghrelin.
And it makes sense if that our
sex hormones and appetite
are tied to our growth hormone release.
This makes sense as to why.
Therefore we can also use it on the other end and say,
okay, well, I can evaluate where these things are
by understanding how hungry you might be. Okay?
So this is important because
if we're trying to make someone more bigger,
you want their spleen sheet up, not only so they can digest,
but also so they're hungry enough
to eat the food they have to eat. Right?
All of these things become important.
Now, there's some additional conversations about this
that I threw in oh, you know, just for fun,
which have to be with the classics also tell us
that the spleen and kidneys support one another,
and as it turns out, the calcitonin supports ANP
that's the kidney and spleen working together again. Okay.
We also see the aldosterone,
which is affecting our blood volume, tonify the lung.
And as we see it, the aldosterone also boosts
the hypoxic inductible factor, HIF.
So this is how that renin angiotensin cascade,
the adrenal cascade, the lungs and kidneys work together
to respirate. Okay.
And also, when we think about
the spleen tonifying the liver,
well, as it turns out ghrelin supports glutathione,
and super oxide dismutase.
Which if you go back to our detoxification discussion,
glutathione, and super oxide dismutase
are signaling molecules involved in the liver phase.
And if the liver is in need of support from detoxification,
this becomes another reason
why we wanna make sure digestion supported
because if our Spleen Qi is deficient
and we don't produce enough ghrelin,
we may not be able to be able to make enough energy
to support the process
plus we may have issues in creating
and producing enough of the glutathione
and super oxide dismutase to support
the process of liver detoxification.
Crucial. That's crucial.
Okay. It's all intertwined.
It's all a web.
Very overwhelming.
But we're gonna break it down and make it easier.
And we're gonna do this
by breaking down these four areas of the digestion
or our for pillars that digestion
and talk about the qualities
that we wanna look for in each of these.
And we're gonna sum that up with some assessments,
some signs and symptoms,
and how we wanna match those signs and symptoms
with interventions.
And we're gonna do that next
as we dive into the next chapter
here on the four pillars of digestion,