Hi everyone !
I wonder if taking digestive aids would reduce the body capacity for digesting if they are no longer taken. Does eating enzymes that help digestion reduce your body’s own production of them ? Since a lot of supplements at least temporarily reduce the body’s own production of that what you take ( granted that your body CAN produce it, i dont think any guy makes his own whey protein ).
Has there been any studies about it, or has using digestive aids caused no rebound effects at all ?
As far as I know, there is no rebound effect from digestive aids. I assume you are speaking about such things as HCl, or gastric lipase, pepsin, etc. If you are talking about insulin production (and I hope you don’t consider insulin a “digestive aid”), then that is another matter. Production of digestive enzymes happens anytime you put something in your stomach and certain environmental factors such as olfactory stimulation, salivation, Ph changes and stetching occur. Hydrochloric acid production is controlled by a negative feedback loop coupled to chyme Ph. It probably isn’t possible to take as much of these things exogenously as your body produces, so you can’t completely supplant their natural production. Also, their half-life is extemely short. HCl, for example, can reach a Ph of 2.0 or lower in the stomach. A few minutes after mixing with food, HCl releases its energy by breaking down the food components and is neutralized. Nothing stays in the stomach very long anyway, and in 24 hours these substances have passed out of the body.
Hormones, on the other hand, last in the body for a much, much longer time. Their release into the body is brought about by an extremeley complex set of interactions between endocrine glands, which can be influenced by any number of factors. They are at the top of the feedback loops for all the metabolic functions of the body, and so these feedback loops controling their release will kick into action immediately to avert what may appear as a “life-threatening” hormone imbalance.