How Important is Chewing Your Food?
Well, in a word, chewing your food adequately is very, very very important. It’s important to maintain your weight, and the integrity and health of your digestive system for a couple of reasons, and there are a lot of people who chew their food way too little and end up paying the price for this little oversight (which is usually a hard to break habit) in several ways.
First of all, chewing your food at least 25 times with each bite, especially the bigger the bite (some of you may balk at this, but this is really important and will help you in so many ways), is essential to making sure your stomach will be able to break down and digest the food properly without over burdening itself. The digestive enzymes in the mouth essentially “pre-digest” the food the longer the food stays in the mouth before it is swallowed and is on it’s way to the stomach for final digestion before it moves through as waste.
If you don’t chew enough, you don’t allow the food enough time in the mouth for this critical “pre-digestion” process that helps speed everything along and makes you into one, big efficient digestion and waste elimination machine. Not only that, but if you chew and essentially liquify the food in the mouth before it is passed on to the stomach instead of leaving large chunks, it leaves more surface area for the digestive enzymes in the stomach to attach to the food and begin their work. What does this mean for you? More efficient digestion, less excess weight most likely, less indigestion, and less gas (that alone if a huge benefit for many of us!)
The second reason that chewing enough is essential to maintaining our ideal weight and losing weight if that is our goal is because the longer we chew our food, the less we eat, since it takes us longer to finish our food, and in that time, it allows our brain more time to receive the signal from the stomach that the body is satiated, or full.
So you’re really killing two birds with one stone by chewing your food several times before swallowing. You get full faster, you essentially create your own natural appetite suppressant, which is very cool, and you make it much easier for your poor stomach to digest the food, leaving the door shut to digestive issues and colon and intestinal discomfort, which is excellent for your overall health.
Many people don’t realize how much their digestive health is linked to other areas of the body and even your mental health. Your whole body suffers if you make it hard for your stomach to accurately digest food and prepare it for smooth elimination. You dig?
