Villi - The gateway of nutrients to your body

Have you ever wander how our body absorbed the nutrients to our cells? When we take the food, say a plate of pasta, the food gets chewed to smaller pieces and passed down to our stomach where it break down to watery form. The next step is it gets down to our intestine. Inside the small intestines, there are small finger like protrusions lining along the wall of intestines. This little tiny villi can only be seen under an electron microscopy. The function of villi is to absorb the nutrients to our body.

Through years, the villi get damaged and break off. The causes of this damaged are:

• Stress
• Medications e.g antibiotic
  
• Toxins like smoking, food coloring and preservative, alcohol, air pollution etc.
• Poor diet
• Irregular sleeping time

The consequence of damaged villi is our body has difficulty to abosrb nutrients. And this is devastating because whatever you eat, the nutrients cannot be absorbed fully and you start to feel you need more food. As a result, you start to spend more money on food or vitamins or nutrition supplements. This is a complete waste of money no matter how much money you spent on supplements or food because your body is not absorbing it.

The following pictures show the difference between healthy villi (left) and damaged villi (right). The damaged villi gets brittle and flat. The efficiency to abosorb nutrients to our body has reduced tremendously.


The symptoms we get from damaged villi would be:

• fatigue
• weak immune system (fall sick easily)
• lack of concentration or ernergy
• food allergies

According to a study made by Cambridge University, the surface area of a male adult's villi is approximately a surface area of two soccer fields. Astonishingly, the surface area of damaged villi is around the area of one tennis court. Let's do an analogy here, if we pour the amount of liquid to fill up two soccer fields and we take the same amount of liquid to pour into one tennis court, certainly, one tennis court cannot hold the liquid of two soccer field and we have to "throw away" the excess liquid. Just imagine, how much nutrients we have wasted from damaged villi?

To take care of our health, we need cellular nutrition which would help to repair and rebuild the villi so that we can get the maximum benefits from the nutrients absorbed by our cell.