Mastication
Mastication is the act of chewing. The more thoroughly you chew, the better it is for your total health = wholeness. When you chew food thoroughly, it is mixed with saliva, which includes the enzyme amylase, which digests starches. Completely-chewed food is broken down into a much larger surface area, meaning more digestive enzymes can work to break down proteins, fats and starches into their components parts — the building blocks for all your cells.
Here’s what it looks like.
Imagine a head of cabbage, with 20 layers of leaves, sitting in your stomach. Enzymes can only attach to the outer surface of food, like the outside of the outer layer of the cabbage. To fully digest it, we would need to pull all the leaves apart and break them into small pieces, like running it through a food processor, exposing much more of the surface area of the cabbage for the enzymes to attach to. The enzymes then go to work, attacking all sides of the pieces, breaking down the food into its usable components for the assimilation phase.
OK, I know you cannot swallow a whole head of cabbage, but you get the point: That’s comparable to people who only chew their food a few times before swallowing. Little chewing produces little surface area for digestion, meaning fewer nutrients are pulled out of the food.
Bottom line: The more we chew, the more we break up our food into tiny pieces, giving our enzymes more surface area to work with, improving the whole digestion process many times. When this is done, enzymes digest even more food, helping to get more valuable nutrients — vitamins, minerals, enzymes, antioxidants and phytochemicals — into our blood for total health = wholeness.
How many times should you chew your food? Until it is the consistency of baby food, usually 25-40 times per bite of food.
When I first started chewing my food thoroughly, I realized that I had been swallowing my food after 8-10 chews. I had to work hard to train myself not to swallow so soon. It took time, but I have learned, the more I chew, the more nutrients enter my body.
Another benefit of thorough chewing is that it “predigests” starches in your food. An enzyme secreted in your saliva digests starches by at least 50 percent before they even hit the hydrochloric acid of the stomach, and then amylase produced in the pancreas finishes the job thoroughly digesting starches and carbohydrates.
Poor chewing habits, meanwhile, can cause maldigestion syndrome, which leads to increased intestinal permeability (“leaky gut” syndrome), which leads to toxicity in the blood — the precursor to sickness. I discuss this more in the next chapter. This is what happens: Your food is made up of starches (carbohydrates), fats, and proteins. If your food is not thoroughly chewed, sufficient surface area is not produced to completely digest all the components of the food. What happens next is a progression of steps that lead to ill health. The carbohydrates start to ferment, the proteins start to putrefy, and the fats start to oxidize, and all become free radicals (which are the most destructive compounds in the body causing rapid destruction of the cells) which are cancer producing. Just imagine putting what you had for dinner last night all mixed together in the oven on very low heat just high enough to keep it warm, then let it stay like that for days, weeks, months, even years. Can you imagine the stench, the bacteria, and the toxic mess you would have? That is exactly what is going on in your digestive tract when your food is not properly chewed and digested. Some of it irritates our bowels and we pass bowel movements with terrible odor, some of it gets pushed into the diverticuli (pockets) in the bowel, where it remains for months to years or until some bowel cleansing program is initiated to remove this toxic mess. All this can occur from NOT CHEWING YOUR FOOD 25-40 TIMES PER BITE. So, relax and enjoy your food, take more time eating your meals, then you will greatly add to your total health = wholeness.