Host: Why is chewing food thoroughly so important?

Jeannette Bessinger: The more you chew, the less you eat because you are literally giving your body time to recognize the fact that it is eating. We eat so much of our food on the run. In the car, when we are watching television and we don t give a very important phase of digestion called as cephalic phase, digestive response time to kick in. In order for that to work, we have to notice our food, see our food, smell it and taste it. If we do that and we chew very thoroughly, we are sending our body the signal that we have actually eaten something and we will absorb it better because the food has been broken up. The particles have been broken up more finely and it will satisfy your hunger to a much deeper degree.

The digestion of carbohydrates happens primarily in the mouth. In this country, we tend to eat our food whole almost like snakes. We break it up just enough so that we can get it down our throat, but it isn't properly chewed. When you eat carbohydrates, the materials that are in your saliva help you to break them down actually in your mouth and especially the top cellulose fibers of plants and things like that will not be broken up anywhere but by your teeth.

So, you need to crush that food with your teeth, mix it with your saliva and it will begin to turn into your body fuel which is glucose, which is a form of sugar, right in your mouth and if you want to try this for yourself take a bite of cracker or bite of rice, chew it very thoroughly and you will find that it becomes sweeter before you even swallow it.