Do you wolf your food down? If you want to be lean and fit for life you might want to consider the relationship between chewing and weight control or weight loss. While most weight management or dietary programs focus on what to eat, little if any attention is given to HOW TO EAT.
What you will see in this article is a practical strategy you can implement right now to lose weight and be lean and fit for life. Simply by chewing your food longer, until it is basically a liquid in your mouth, you do three things that help your weight loss, health and longevity. The first is that you will eat less. The second is that you will digest and assimilate nutrients more effectively; the third is that you will mitigate toxins and allergies from food, which are important to longevity and weight loss.
Chewing and Food Intake: Recent studies from Oita Medical School in Japan show a direct relationship between chewing speed and the release of histamine from the brain. Chewing slower and longer causes the brain to release histamine, resulting in decreased food intake.
The speed at which you chew sends signals to your brain that control how much you eat.
Further, hormones such as leptin, ghrelin and cholestokinnen that are involved in the sensation of fullness, do not reach peak expression until 20 to 40 minutes after food is ingested. Chewing longer allows these hormones to work for you. You get the same sense of fullness on less food because you are giving these hormones time to work. Many speed eaters literally chew and swallow faster than their bodies natural satiety signaling can keep up with. If you want to lose weight but you wolf your food down, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
There is a direct relationship between chewing and weight loss. Simply put, the more you chew, and the more slowly you chew, the less you eat. The less you eat at any given meal, the more weight loss.
Chewing and Digestion and Absorption. Eating the right foods gets you nowhere if you don’t absorb them. Worse, eating the right foods takes you backwards if they putrefy into toxins.
Eating the right food is important, but eating the right food and properly digesting it is essential for life long weight loss.
Digestion begins in the mouth. Specifically, saliva contains a fat metabolizing enzyme called lingual lipase. Before any fat you ingest even hits your stomach, it begins breaking down in your mouth via the action of lingual lipase.
As you can guess, the key issue here is how long you chew your food. This is important for 2 reasons. The first reason is that the more your chew, the more surface area of the food in your mouth comes in contact with lingual lipase. The second is reason is due to allergies. The more undigested food you have in your stomach the more prone you are to getting food allergies. Food allergies hamper your weight loss and longevity. Your mouth has a similar action for carbohydrates. Your saliva contains an enzyme called salivary amylase. Salivary amylase works to break down carbs into simpler sugars.
The most basic rule of thumb if you want to see the greatest absorption of the good foods you are eating to lose weight is more chews equals better digestion and absorption. The reason this matters is simply that undigested and unabsorbed food sitting in your stomach and small intestine tends to putrefy and cause allergic and inflammatory reactions. Take protein for example. Proteins tend to be difficult for the body to break down. There are many examples of proteins that are semi soft such as sushi, eggs, and yogurt, really tender fish, which often are mostly swallowed without chewing. What happens is these proteins have major portions of their mass that sit in your stomach and literally rot and putrefy. Many people are allergic to eggs primarily because they do not adequately chew them
Many people who have a difficult time with weight loss have a difficult time with digestion and food allergies. Lack of adequate chewing is a principle reason why.
If you want the greatest weight loss in the short term, and to lose weight and keep it off for a lifetime, you not only have to eat the right foods, but you have to absorb them correctly. The single most important thing you can do is to chew your food until it is basically a liquid in your mouth. By doing this you will eat less, absorb more and keep your physiology young longer by virtue of creating fewer toxins from digestion.
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