Have you ever thought about chewing your food? How many times do you chew per bite? Do you add more food before you finish what’s already in your mouth? Do you chew at all or just inhale your food? The mouth is where we begin to process food mechanically and chemically. Properly chewing your food will make digestion easier on your system and enhance the amount of nutrients you are able to absorb.
We have teeth for a reason. Our front teeth, or incisors, are built for slicing through food and giving us manageable chunks that our back molars can grind up into tiny bits. This keeps us from choking on big hunks of steak, but it also serves a more intricate purpose. In order for food to be utilized as fuel it has to be broken down into smaller and smaller parts until it can eventually be absorbed through the small intestine and circulated into our bloodstream. Chewing your food until adequately coated in saliva allows these downstream processes to take place more effectively.
Saliva itself plays a major role on the front end of digestion. Amylase and lipase are two chemicals in your saliva that assist in the breakdown of carbohydrates and fat respectively. By giving your food adequate time in your mouth saliva and its digestive components can contact as much of the food as possible and initiate digestion before the food even hits your stomach.
Aside from the local effects chewing can influence, it also serves to prime the rest of your digestive system. The taste and smell of food stimulates enzymes throughout your body to begin their release preparing to breakdown food. I love analogies, so think of this like a warm up. If you are going to do sprints you probably wouldn’t walk onto a track and test your 60m time without warming up. You’d more than likely injure yourself because the body functions more effectively after it is warmed up.
My goal is help people optimize performance. If something as easy as chewing your food can provide your body with more nutrients to keep you working hard day in and day out, it’s a no brainer. If you’re not sold on chewing just yet, let’s take a one more look at why it’s so important.
After food leaves the mouth chemicals are used to process food by surrounding it with liquid. The more surface area that is exposed, the more of these chemicals can interact and do their thing. If there are big chunks of food, they are going to get pushed through so they don’t start to rot inside you. In the meantime they will produce large amounts of foul smelling gas until they are cleared from your system. Food that has been properly chewed will be mush when it enters your stomach and easily coated by all the juices containing digestive enzymes. Once it pushes into your intestines more juices will continue to coat this food and finalize the break down before it is absorbed.
To be absorbed nutrients must move through the lining of your small intestine and into your blood. Only the food that has been chemically broken down into micro-sized pieces will be able to do this. Anything that’s too large will either sit in your stomach, producing the smelly gas I mentioned a moment ago, or simply be pushed through in much the same form it came in as. Corn anyone?
Chew your food, give your body time to do it’s thing and absorb the maximal amount of nutrients from the food you put into your body. This is a low effort and free way to enhance your performance. Take advantage.
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