Chewing Food More Thoroughly Results in Reduced Insulin Output (2013)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Meanwhile, plasma concentrations of glucose (P= 0·024), insulin (P< 0·001) and GIP (P< 0·001) were higher following the forty-chews meal."
But your conclusion and the paper's title is right:
"Increasing the number of masticatory cycles is associated with reduced appetite and __altered__ postprandial plasma concentrations of gut hormones, insulin and glucose"
One may also add (2012) to the title.
> Doesn't this suggest that if you want to eat a lot of food but don't want to absorb too much of it (i.e., are concerned about weight gain), you should chew less?
In the study they found that more chewing was correlated with higher satiety and lower food intake in the follow up meal. This may show that if you are concerned about weight gain you should chew more and then you'll naturally eat less.
Or it may increase, or it may go one way for some foods/people and the opposite for others.
Another intuition of mine is that when we finally have realtime monitoring of blood sugar (some future Apple Watch, for example) and exactly what was eaten when, we will discover to our "surprise" that there is so much variation in individual response to consumption of the same quantity of the same food (and even variation for the same person at different times of day and variation for what else was eaten and when) that it will be obvious why nutritional studies based on the usual averaging of crowds never seemed to converge on the right answer. Some averages are meaningless.
That's an interesting take! You're probably right.
(Is anyone working on non invasive blood sugar monitoring?)
I doubt this is possible without some kind of catalyst. There’s just nothing all that unique about the composition or phonon modes of sugar or insulin.
There are other fluids aside from blood though. I think those have promise. Google X was working on a CGM in a contact lens. Maybe somebody is working on a CGM in dental roots. Gastric sensors may be just as good.
Continuous Glucose Monitors exist and, at least for the one I have, test your blood on a fairly regular basis (every 5 minutes). As a diabetic, getting one was life altering; the best positive change in my life for a very long time.
I would highly recommend a CGM to type 1 diabetics. I have the Dexcom G6, and the low blood sugar (current and impending) are amazing.
Even with a metabolic disorder, the steep rise in blood sugar is not the problem. The lack of a steep fall in blood sugar is a problem, however.
If you were to swallow a grape whole, you'd probably pass it whole as well and none of the carbohydrates would be released.
I don't disagree that your body could extract some of it. The grape has a tear in the skin at the top, but compared to chewing? Very little is absorbed.
Erm, did you never noticed how some food like corn comes out on the toilet pretty much unchanged(and therefore not digested) if you ate in a hurry before?
So obviously yes, even without complex chemical analysis your theory seems to be right.
Source: I poked at it.
I've heard this, but never experienced it myself. No corn shell in my stool. I've also heard people say hot sauce is just as hot coming out as going in. I've also never experienced that (whew!). I do struggle with my weight, so maybe that's why? My gut microbes are extracting every bit of all the food I eat?
P.S. - In all seriousness maybe that's why I've been able to be a vegetarian for 30 years without suffering from the ill effects people typically suffer, such as excessive gas. Maybe I really do digest cellulose better than most.
Depends on how much you eat, leastwise based on my own experience.
There was a point in my distant youth where I thought it was amusing to put as much spicy stuff on a meal as I could manage. Red pepper flakes, cayenne powder, tabasco, etc. It absolutely did burn going out--but only for about 5 minutes. I apparently ate enough to--err--make things go numb.
It was a very weird sensation and something I never did again given how unpleasant the whole experience was.
I'd imagine the people who--for whatever insane reason--participate in ghost pepper challenges experience something very similar if they can keep them down long enough to partake of the journey to completion.
I mean there is niche stuff like lactose tolerance, which only is present in some populations. That's a little different. I wasn't even aware of it until I moved out of the place I grew up.
I studied plenty of biology 25 years ago. Gut flora were not discuss in great detail back then. It's a relatively new focus of biology and I don't think it comes under "basic" human biology.
Cattle and other animals are able to do so because they have multiple stomachs. Apparently bacteria in some of the stomachs help with this process.
The OP says "most people don't have such gut microbes" implying that some people do - that's what I was asking about.
Doesn't this suggest that "some" people do have such microbes? Otherwise the word "most" should have been omitted. Maybe that is where my confusion arises from.
If you want to reduce absorption, particularly of fat, there's some evidence increasing dietary fibre a bit will help with that.
But in general, calories in = calories in.
This physician summarized studies[0] that showed that blended food spiked insulation vs. the same food that was chewed. His information seemed solid, so this title was surprising to see.
> Compared with fifteen chews, chewing forty times per portion resulted in lower hunger (P= 0·009), preoccupation with food (P= 0·005) and desire to eat (P= 0·002).
If you chew more, then you will feel fuller by the time you finish your meal. That feeling could be the difference between over-eating (going back for another helping), and mindful eating (stopping because you are full).
IIRC, a yoga book I read said that you should stop eating when you still feel slightly hungry - a point that I've anecdotally found makes sense, because if you wait a bit more, that slight hunger disappears.
Also, it says that at end of a meal, your stomach should be half full of food, quarter of water, and quarter of air. Gives better digestion. Also seems to make sense.
Also, the control is 15 chews? My experience of teenage boys eating pizza is 3 chews max.
Don't those two go together naturally?
But it got me thinking--I wonder if these "old guard" values are related to food scarcity? We (peoples of industrialized nations), live in a world of abundance when it comes to food. High calorie food sources are cheap and plentiful.
We don't need to chew our cheerios so much, because a machine already chewed them for us. We don't need to chew our chicken so much, because there's more where that came from.
In fact, the "chew your food" lesson in childhood always came up during meals where we ate steak, and not so much other meals. Now part of this was due to the fact that the steak was tough and chewy (they cooked it well-done). However, I think it's worth considering the fact that steak is expensive, and if I was eating steak then there was not more where that came from.
So maybe part of that "chew your food" lesson was actually a different one: "savor this food, because it's the last that you'll have until tomorrow."
Notably, my recent ancestors were Okies.
In that sense the nuance is not that this might be the last food you get for a while - but rather that having food is no big deal, don't make it seem like this is the first meal you've had in forever.
Another rule (not the same but similar) is to finish each course at the same time as the host, not sooner nor later.
Now overcooking a steak is a just sin. It should be like butter
It's a good thing, because while I'm taking 40 chews per bite of pizza, all of my buddies are inhaling theirs, and there's none left after I've finished my slice.
IE, 25g per minute chewed 15 times vs 25g per minute chewed 40 times.
This would be highly dependant on the type of food. Bread (and pizza) chunks break down well in the gut, in comparison to mushrooms that hardly break down at all after chewing.
Insulin is released in response to blood sugar. Guesswork extrapolation : Chewing more increases surface area increasing the speed of digestion. I am not sure how chewing interacts with the amount of overall time food spends in the gut.
Still very interesting work. I would love to see an analysis of stomach acid production in relation to chewing cycles.
Of note, and correct me if I am wrong, but isn't n30 the minimum for statistical significance? (even though n30 is still laughably low, and id prefer n3000)
It depends on the size of the effect, among other things. Maybe you are thinking about student-t distributions being approximated by normal distributions?
> Insulin is released in response to blood sugar.
This is true, but is only part of the picture. There are other hormones like incretins. There is even what they call the cephalic phase insulin response that occurs before blood glucose concentrations increase. I think it even can occur just from imagining eating food.
The paper reports that more chewing lead better satiety and facilitate glucose absorption. From what I understand this means that they chewing gives you more net energy out of your carbohydrate food.
Of course? Insulin is the hormone that regulates uptake of sugars and mastication releases simpler sugars by literally cracking bigger ones? Weve known that the digestion of carbs begins in the mouth.
Processed foods are notorious for higher glycemic index numbers and in many cases they are simply externally pre-masticated by grinding, thereby skipping a step that might have some sort of feedback mechanism
Might not get it down to a monomer but certainly breaks it apart for the enzymes to have more ends to attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Fletcher
Franz Kafka chewed his food excessively to the extend that people refused to eat dinner with him.
I wonder if the satiety increase isn’t due to spreading consumption over a longer period of time. Increasing the time between bites might also improve satiety. I didn’t read the full paper, this point may have been addressed.
"Nature will castigate those who don't masticate." he used to say
Fast forward a few years and her pancreas tapped out...type 1 diabetes.
That seems a little low to draw conclusions from?
It is interesting to think about the fact that soylent is effectively "chewed for you" via pre-processing. Maybe if we could chew soylent then it would be a better food substitute, because we would feel fuller after eating it.