ATOMIC DOG

I'd like to take a moment to talk about my stool.

Oh, what? You don't want to hear about my stool? Oh, oh, okay, you don't mind so much when I talk about hoo-hahs and breasts and peckers and stuff, but then you get all prissy on me when I want to talk about something truly important.

Sure, I get it.

Actually, what I really want to talk about is digestion, but you're kidding yourself if you think you can have a serious discussion about digestion without mentioning stools! That's like talking about Angelina Jolie and not even mentioning that hunky Brad Pitt.

Even so, I'll defer from talking about my stool for the moment, but that's purely out of consideration for you sensitive types out there.

The thing is, I've been thinking about digestion an awful lot lately, partly because of some self-experimentation and partly because of a couple of articles I read about Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham.

Wrangham has stirred the anthropological wok by suggesting that human evolution has been hugely spurred by the simple act of cooking food.

A few years ago, while contemplating an open fire and preparing for a lecture on human evolution, Wrangham mused, "What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?"

Most anthropologists would probably answer, "a nice suit, a good haircut, and maybe a Twitter account," but not Wrangham. The answer, he decided, would be using fire to cook food.

Creatures of the Flame

Wrangham's "cooking hypothesis" suggests that humans adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way cows adapted to eating grass, fleas adapted to sucking blood, or poodles adapted to eating Snausages:

"And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame."

Wrangham believes the very act of exposing food to fire changed the way humans looked. Quite simply, cooking frees up calories. It makes food easier to digest and over the eons, this led to smaller human teeth, flatter ribs, smaller guts, bigger brains, and more energy.

There are a number of anthropologists who posit that the evolutionary irritant was simply meat eating as opposed to cooking the meat (and other "raw" foods), but Wrangham disagrees.

"Raw meat is not that attractive, particularly the kind of meat you cut off an animal that has been living under stressful conditions in the African savanna...digestibility of animal protein increases when it is cooked. And that's because it's denatured—the protein is unfolded...opening them up to the point where proteolytic enzymes have easier access."

Now the average smarty pants might counter that raw food and cooked food, regardless of whether we're talking about grains, vegetables, or meat, are calorically equivalent, so what's the dif?

Sure, put a cooked zucchini and a raw zucchini in a bomb calorimeter, burn them up, and you'll get the same number of calories. The same goes for raw oats and cooked oats and raw rib eye and flame-broiled rib eye. But your gut isn't as efficient as a bomb calorimeter and cooking just makes the nutrients more accessible; it increases the portion of nutrients the body digests.

For instance, as Wrangham notes, cooking an egg increases the percentage of available nutrients from 50 to 90. Furthermore, cooking reduces the energy costs we pay to digest food.

"We all fall asleep after a heavy meal, but if you eat a large meal of raw food, you'll fall asleep faster, because your body is working harder. More oxygen will be leaving your peripheral tissues and going to your intestinal organs."

Wrangham also points to the "raw foodists," those pale, boney dietary rebels who refuse to eat any food that's been exposed to temperatures higher than 116 degrees Fahrenheit. The raw foodists maintain that cooking diminishes the nutritional value of the food, but Wrangham asserts that people who switch to a raw food diet report feeling constant hunger and lose large amounts of weight. They also get really grouchy as they're rarely invited to barbecues or 4th of July meat-a-paloozas.

Wrangham has taken his theories on food digestibility and assimilation one step further, using them to challenge our modern food labeling system.

"When you treat food through processing or grinding, you're not actually creating more calories—so technically, the food labeling system we have now is correct. But, if we want to be more realistic about the caloric value we actually get from a food, we need to modify our labels to reflect more subtle measurements—something like: 'This item has been given level 2 processing, which has increased its nutritional value by 50 percent.'"

It's an interesting idea, but it's not entirely new.

The Great Masticator

The acolytes of early 20th-century food faddist Horace Fletcher were also big on the idea of extracting more nutrients from food — not necessarily through cooking, but excruciatingly excessive chewing.

Fletcher, who was known as "The Great Masticator," argued that each bite of food, each mouthful of liquid in fact, had to be chewed 32 times before being swallowed.

"Nature will castigate those who don't masticate," he was fond of saying.

Fletcher believed that mastication would greatly increase one's strength while reducing the amount of food consumed. As proof of this increased strength and vitality, he allegedly conducted a series of experiments at Yale Gymnasium where, at the age of 58, he competed against college athletes.

In one such experiment, he claimed to lift "three hundred pounds dead weight three hundred fifty times with his right calf." The written accounts of that experiment purport that Fletcher outperformed the Yale athletes in the aforementioned test and, in fact, all other such tests.

Whether or not the results were true, Fletcher and his devotees used them to perpetuate and endorse his theories. It worked, because Fletcherizing became "all the rage," boasting such devotees as Upton Sinclair, Henry James, and John D. Rockefeller.

Furthermore, Fletcher took great interest in human excrement, believing that it was pretty much a window into one's health, albeit a dreary back window with a rotten view and smelly drapes. If one was in good health, their excreta or digestive "ash" was entirely "inoffensive," which meant that it didn't smell.

Was Fletcher on to something? It's possible, but one of the few known semi-scientific studies on the methodology revealed less-than-promising results.

Back in the 1920's, over an 18-month period, Dr. Harold G.O. Hoick dutifully chewed each piece of food he ate for the requisite 32 times. By the time the experiment ended, he'd lost 30 pounds and suffered a decrease in muscular endurance, along with a loss of efficiency on his typewriter (probably denoting a decline in mental alertness).

Regrettably, Hoick didn't reveal how the protocol affected his bowels.

A Digestive Cauldron

As you can probably surmise, the Fletcherizing fad didn't last very long. Practicing it was tedious and probably took all the joy out of eating. Practitioners were probably social pariahs, too, as people who suffered their presence would probably be gulping down their cheesecakes while the bastard Fletcherizers were still working on their salad, making them all very late for the theater.

Maintaining enthusiasm for the practice was probably as hard as maintaining their body weight and energy levels, too.

It didn't have a chance.

Even so, Fletcherizing, or at least a form of it, does have its modern day advocates, although they're not quite as strict as Fletcher. Dr. Ken Kinakin, noted chiropractor and strength/conditioning specialist, says that about 30% of digestion happens in the mouth. As such, he urges people to chew their food; even "chew" their protein shakes:

The digestive process is started by chewing...that chewing motion creates salivation within the mouth and it 'tags' the different enzymes within the actual protein, allowing you to break it down better. If you're a person who has gas after ingesting a protein shake, then just chew the liquid [about five or six times] and you'll probably solve that problem.

Clearly, food-faddist Fletcher, anthropologist Wrangham, and Kinakin were/are probably on to something very important about food, or more specifically, digestion.

The more food is "broken down," whether by cooking or the mechanical action of teeth (or grinding mills used in manufacturing certain foods), the better the body is able to absorb and utilize nutrients.

But all we've looked at so far are processes that occur outside, or in the case of chewing, above the gut. Generally speaking, a healthy gut works pretty well, as long as the food is sufficiently broken down. It's pretty much a digestive cauldron, turning most carbohydrates, proteins, and fats into a liquid nutrient and energy stew.

Personally, I've been kind of skeptical about the need for digestive support and I'm not alone here, as most physicians and mainstream nutritionists probably feel the same way.

But I'm a lot less skeptical lately.

An Epic Toilet Bowl Battle

Charles Poliquin once wrote that he was "amazed how a correction in HCL [Hydrochloric Acid] deficiency has led to not only dramatic improvements in physique and strength...in strength-trained individuals those improvements often [were] associated with gains of 15 to 18 pounds of lean body mass in just months."

When asked why, Poliquin responded, "They are now absorbing proteins and nutrients."

I raised an eyebrow over those assertions, but I've recently been more receptive to such claims. It seems that HCL deficiency just might be more common than many have thought.

Apparently, HCL levels, and levels of digestive enzymes in general, decrease as we age. Abusing our gastrointestinal tracts and whole bodies through too much food, too many drugs/chemicals, and too much stress also depletes levels.

The parietal cells of the stomach produce and secrete HCL in response to ingested proteins or fats. It should also be noted that HCL doesn't really digest food on its own. Instead, it creates an environment in which digestion begins. The HCL converts pepsinogen into pepsin, which is an enzyme that breaks down proteins in the stomach.

If you don't have enough HCL, the conversion doesn't take place and digestion fails.

Likewise, when we eat more frequently than we need to, as bodybuilders and strength athletes are wont to do, or if we over consume proteins, as bodybuilders and strength athletes almost always do, HCL production decreases.

This also leads to poor digestion, symptoms of which might be gas, bloating, discomfort, or inefficient utilization or food energy and nutrients. It might even lead to the dreaded "offensive excreta" foretold by Horace Fletcher.

I've begun conducting experiments on myself for a month now, and while a scientific study with only one participant probably won't sway too many minds (and guts), it's interesting nonetheless.

I've never been a raw food advocate, so cooking my food is nothing new. I have, however, been a notorious food gulper, my eating habits strongly resembling a Gila Monster trying to swallow, through muscular contractions and neck flexing, a desert-dried rat carcass.

Historically, I'd feel sick after I ate any kind of heavy animal protein such as steak.

I now chew my food thoroughly, not perhaps so much as recommended by Fletcher, but more than I used to. Similarly, I thoroughly masticate my Metabolic Drive shakes.

I've also begun taking 500 mg. Betaine Hydrochloride capsules, one before each protein meal. Amazingly, I no longer feel nauseated after eating a steak. Neither do I feel discomfort or bloat, no matter how sizeable the meal.

Furthermore, my excreta transformed. (I told you I wanted to talk about my stool.) Before the extra chewing and supplementing with HCL, my stool usually resembled a miniature replica of the Japanese WWII battleship Yamato, complete with rotating gun turrets and fully operational propellers.

And, inexplicably, like the Yamato, at least until it sank in April of 1945, my stool would float.

And now, after chewing and taking HCL? My stool is shaped more like the silent, sleek, Caterpillar Drive Typhoon-Class submarine from The Hunt for Red October. It prowls the depths of the toilet bowl barely stirring the waters above.

(I must admit, in my imagination, I wage epic toilet bowl battles between the two turd types, but the Red October always wins.)

Most remarkably, though, I seem to be gaining a little lean body weight without really having changed my caloric intake. Granted, at any given time, I'm taking a medicine cabinet's worth of Biotest supplementation, some currently available to the market, some not, along with the best food available, so it's hard to say where the increased mass is coming from.

However, given that I haven't really increased caloric intake, it's at least a reasonable gut assumption that the HCL could be "freeing up" more amino acids and more nutrients.

It takes a bit of a leap of faith to believe that Wrangham was correct in asserting that making digestion easier, through cooking food with fire, led to gradual but profound changes in the human body, but it's a much smaller leap of faith to believe that making digestion easier could lead to gradual but profound changes in your body.