HEALTH REPORT
Festive Feasting
In the next few months, the odds are you will be eating more food; however, the real issue is not the quantity or type of food, but the time you spend eating it.
The Australian ‘silly season’ does not feature just one big celebratory meal; it is actually a series of very long meals. Dips and nibbles at 11 o’clock. Offerings from the barbeque at one. Pavlova, trifle or pudding (or all three) at four, followed by cheese and crackers at five - by which point nobody is entirely sure whether they are finishing lunch or starting dinner. This long drawn-out style of eating is likely
a sustained period of time, this will require harnessing several different enzymes to help. The enzymes will work in a particular sequence when you are grazing over several hours, as opposed to sitting for a normal meal. Chewing is the mechanical step, breaking food down and mixing it with saliva, which contains amylase to break down starch. Once this is in your stomach, the enzyme protease switches into action to pull protein apart and churn everything into a loose mixture. Digestion continues in the small intestine, with
to be duplicated at another event three days later, and again the week after. It may seem leisurely, but it actually demands something quite different from your digestive system than a single sitting does. Enzymes to the rescue Enzymes are what make food able to be digested and nutrients to be absorbed by the body. Each enzyme does basically the same job of taking a large molecule of food and breaking it into pieces tiny enough to cross your gut wall barrier. Complex carbohydrates become simple sugars, protein becomes amino acids and fat is turned into fatty acids and glycerol. Each enzyme is also specific to one particular job. For example, amylase works on starch, but leaves protein alone; protease processes protein and ignores starch. Therefore, when you are presented with a variety of different foods and eat them over
the pancreas delivering enzymes to further break down carbohydrates, protein and fat. Now, your body makes enzymes itself, and small amounts occur naturally in some foods. A digestive enzyme supplement can be a useful extra hand when meals are big, rich and spread over hours. There is one part of a plant meal, though,
that is always hard going: cellulose, the tough fibre in plant cell walls. Your own enzymes only partly break it down, so a lot of the fibre in festive salads, coleslaw and roast veggies travels through your gut largely whole. Your gut bacteria then ferment that fibre, along with anything else left undigested, and that is where the gas and bloating of a long grazing-style meal often come from.
Cellulose is the tough fibre in plant cell
walls that your own enzymes barely touch, so the festive salads, coleslaw and roast
veggies travel through your gut largely intact for the bacteria to ferment.
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ISSUE 78 • 2026
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