AYURVEDA PERSPECTIVE ON INCOMPLETE CHEWING

Chewing & Your Health

Chewing grinds up hard chunks of food and liquefies your food, turning it into a slushy paste. Thorough chewing immediately exposes your food to digestive juices in your saliva, and after swallowing, your stomach as well, thus ensuring better digestion. Chewing can be a great remedy for many digestive ailments. Popping enzyme pills or probiotics pales in comparison to the simple, mechanical benefits of careful chewing.

Once I had a client with Crohn's disease that swallowed an unchewed almond by accident. The almond got caught in his colon which eventually had to be amputated as a result. That's a heavy price to pay for incomplete chewing. Consider this: How much longer would it take your stomach acids to dissolve a whole peanut compared to one completely mashed and mixed with saliva?

Insufficient chewing of food forces your stomach to break down your food by acids. This takes both time and effort, and leads to a delay in digestion. As digestion is a metabolically intense process, poorly chewed food makes you and your digestive tract feel tired. Incomplete chewing saps your energy. While your stomach churns away, your gut will feel heavy as if you've eaten a large meal.

Incomplete chewing causes sluggish digestion or even worse: acid reflux, indigestion, and bloating. If you have acid reflux, proper chewing is one of the best ways to minimize the amount of time the food sits in your stomach, so that acids won't linger. If you can't produce enough acid or enzymes in your gut to digest your food well, use your saliva to lighten the burden on these organs. Saliva contains digestive enzymes that start breaking down your food right away. To boot, mastication actually increases saliva output by 10x. Saliva has many other benefits as well. Its antibodies flag toxins for the immune system to destroy. Its antiseptic nature kills bacteria. And the hormones in saliva stimulate gut contraction to move food along the GI tract.

Chewing Your Food Ayurvedically

My Ayurvedic teacher, Dr. Vasant Lad, used to tell us "drink your food and chew your liquid." We suggest you keep chewing your food until it is completely liquefied and loses its flavor, generally about 20 times. Fully pummel it, pound it, and pulverize it, to ensure you mix up all of your food and drink with your saliva.

Horace Fletcher may be forever known as the world's greatest champion of chewing. The famous health food enthusiast of the Victorian era promoted thorough chewing, becoming a millionaire in the process. Fletcher's laboratory experiments showed that comprehensive chewing improved vitality, strength, and even thinking ability. In his words, "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate."

The patient attention of meticulous mastication allows you to savor the flavors of the tastes in your food. Ayurveda believes that each of the 6 tastes - sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and astringent - has a medicinal effect on the body and an important role in the digestive process. Ideally all 6 are present in a meal. Allow your tastebuds to soak each one up.

Mindful eating also gives you the chance to connect with your body and its reaction to your food. What subtle reactions do you notice as you eat broccoli? This sort of self awareness is the basis of healing in Ayurveda. It naturally prevents you from overeating and from eating foods that don't agree with you. Use your extensive chewing as a contemplative practice. Allow it to encourage your appreciation of the gift of nourishment you've received.

Images of Incomplete Chewing