I am a fast eater. Always have been, at least since my college days, perhaps prior to that as well. Not sure why I am that way, but I do know that when dining with friends, I am among the first to finish a meal.
I am attempting to put an end to that.
A friend of mine some time ago — so long ago I can’t remember his name (oh, wait, I think it was Wallace Berry) — used to make a big deal about chewing. He insisted that each bite should be chewed thoroughly. He had a precise number of times, I forget the number (seems like it was in the 20s), that he chewed each bite of food to ensure its proper mastication and digestion.
Okay, maybe that guy was a little OCD, but he had a point, and I’ve always remembered it.
Why chew? Here’s what I’ve found from reading and experimenting.
“Chewing gears up the rest of the digestive system, gets it ready to process incoming nutrition.” This sounds tenuous to me, but maybe. Maybe that’s why chewing gum gives you gas (supposedly — I’ve read about this phenomenon, but I don’t chew gum, so I don’t know if it’s true for me or not).
“Chewing gives your system more time to process the food, to understand how much food you’ve consumed, and to more readily let you know when you are full.” Again, this sounds a bit nonsensical to me. How much time does my stomach really need to let my brain know it’s full? It’s not like I swallow a whole stomachful of food at once.
“Chewing adds saliva to the food, which helps break it down.” Digestion is a mechanical AND chemical process, so this makes sense, exposing more of the food’s surface area to the chemicals in saliva would be beneficial.
“Having been chewed helps when the food hits the gastric juices in the stomach.” This is to me the most obvious benefit of chewing. I mean, if you were to drop an intact hunk of steak into a jar of acid, and a chewed up hunk into a different jar of acid, it’s easy to imagine which would dissolve first. (For those of you who have problems with imagination, the chewed up hunk will.)
But why did I call that “the most obvious benefit of chewing”? I have a very practical reason: The longer your food takes to digest, the more gas you produce, and we all know how uncomfortable that can be.
I’ve experimented with chewing more over the past couple of weeks, and I have definitely noticed some improvement in my gastric comfort. I’ll continue to work on my chewing — after all, a lifetime of bad chewing is not going to fix itself that easily — and see what happens.