It's Like Making Cookies!

Getting the nutrients from our food is like making cookies! (Recipe below!) There's a process that has to be followed if you want the sweet results.

The first step is assembling the materials. For cookies, this means making sure you have a bowl, a spoon, a cookie sheet, and all the ingredients. For our bodies, it means shifting from work mode into digestion mode. This process actually starts in the brain when we think about eating, see appetizing food, or smell tantalizing fragrances. An actual physiological change takes us from a fight-or-flight stance into a rest-and-digest way of being. We enhance the process by sitting down and expressing gratitude for the food we are about to eat. These subtle changes actually precipitate salivation.

It may seem a small thing to drool over your food, but it's as necessary as cutting open the bag of chocolate chips. For all their deliciousness, those chips won't do the cookies any good if they stay packaged up. Saliva opens the digestive process by moistening the food so it can be swallowed. Saliva also begins breaking down carbohydrates. Unfortunately, gulping down those carbs without adequately moistening them with saliva can be like dumping the whole package of chocolate chips into the dough, plastic and all.

Another preliminary step may be some chopping. It wouldn't do to put whole Brazil nuts or an entire chocolate bar into the bowl. To make sure that each cookie has some of the special ingredients, you  want to cut them into bite-size pieces. This equates to chewing. Chewing primes the food for the subsequent step.

The next step in cookie-making is to mix wet and dry ingredients together in the bowl. In your body, the bowl is the stomach, where stomach acid combines with swallowed food. The beauty of an acidic stomach is that it sterilizes the ingredients, knocking off the E. coli, salmonella, and other harmful pathogens. Stomach acid also activates pepsin to start breaking down proteins. After all, no one wants a lumpy dough, with nodes of unmixed flour or baking powder in their cookie! Nor do you want undigested proteins getting into your bloodstream!

I must mention the leavening. In cookies, there is usually a substance that re-acts and creates a change in the dough, such as baking powder or baking soda. In digestion, enzymes from the pancreas  effect change. But, unless enough stomach acid has been produced, these enzymes are not released, and digestion remains incomplete. The change we are looking for is carbohydrates into glucose, fats into fatty acids and glycerols, and the completion of proteins into peptides and amino acids. 

In our recipe there may also be blending, so that fats don't float on top of egg whites but are blasted into particles tiny enough to be suspended into the liquid. The bile-storing gall bladder which contracts in the presence of fats, could be compared to beaters that enact this process.

Finally, baking the cookies prepares them for our consumption. In the kitchen, molecules giving off the scent of chocolate float through the air and out of the oven, telling us the food is ready. In the "oven" of the small intestines, the nutrients pass through the mucous membrane and out into the body. If they have truly been prepared properly, the result is very fine indeed! However, sometimes they haven't been chopped or blended or catalyzed as they should. The result can be compared to either under-cooking or over-cooking. Whether it's "dough-y" or "burned" it can make you sick!

Last, but not least, is the clean-up. Counters must be wiped, dishes washed, floors swept, and garbage thrown away. Any cookies not eaten are stored away. That is what happens in the large intestines. Then the whole process can start again!

Double Chocolate Chews  - Makes 18 cookies
1/2 c. pure almond butter (no additives)
2 Tb. coconut oil
3 Tb. 100% cacao powder, unsweetened
1 pastured egg
1 banana, mashed
1/4 c. coconut sugar
1 1/4 c. light buckwheat flour
1 tsp. aluminum-free baking powder
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. sea salt
2 oz. chopped nuts, optional
2 oz. dark chocolate bar, 70% cacao, chopped into "chips"

Blend the almond butter, coconut oil, cacao, egg, and banana until smooth. Mix in sugar, flour, baking powder, vanilla, cinnamon and salt. Fold in nuts and chocolate chips. Roll into balls and place on parchment-lined baking sheet. Flatten with palm of hand. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes.