Saliva is extremely important for your health. As soon as you eat and chew your food, extra saliva is produced. This saliva allows your food to fall apart into tiny pieces. There is a substance, an enzyme in your saliva called amylase. Amylase helps with the digestion of starch in bread and potatoes, for example. Your body can normally not digest starch well, but when it is mixed with saliva, amylase begins the process and you have less trouble with this later on in your stomach and intestines.

Chewing Well Helps You to Feel Satisfied Sooner

When you chew well, the food turns into smaller pieces and the amylase is more effective. Later, in your stomach and intestines, more food is digested and processed, giving you a stronger feeling of satisfaction. You feel less like eating something else. Compare it to a handful of nuts. If you don’t chew the nuts well, you poop most of them out. If you chew the nuts until they are fine, your body can extract more nutrition from them and you feel fuller.

Protection and Activation

Saliva plays an important role in the condition of your mouth. It protects your mouth from bacteria and fungi and makes sure that wounds in your mouth heal quickly. Something else I once learned from the lessons of traditional Chinese Medicine is that when you chew, your whole digestive system is activated, because the signal is given from your mouth that food is on its way. Your digestive system prepares itself for that by producing gastrointestinal fluids.

Too Hurried or Too Much Medication?

Peaceful eating and chewing are difficult for many people. Eating quickly, or hastily eating while standing, results in little saliva being secreted and large pieces of food reaches your stomach. “Hey!” your stomach cries, “can’t it be finer?” When you flush each bite by drinking something, your saliva has little chance of mixing with the food. Eating in front of the television or in chatty company usually also doesn’t allow the serenity in which you can chew your food well and give saliva the chance to do its work.

Some people do not have enough saliva present in their mouths, for example through medicine use or illness, such as by diabetes or Sjögren’s syndrome. This is a great problem for these people; among other things, their mouths have little protection against bacteria and fungi.

MIR-Method, Step 5 Plays a Major Role

Step 5 “Supplement all shortages” plays a large role in the proper working of your saliva. If you have a shortage of amylase or other substances that are necessary for digestion, you can replenish these deficiencies with step 5. You tell your body to create these substances again. In addition, all of the steps work together to restore your inner peace so that you become aware of how much finer it is to live calmly, to eat and to take more time letting your food move around your mouth.

Chew 40 Times or 20?

According to guidelines we should chew each bite 40 times. Have you ever done that? You should try it just for fun. If you try it, you’ll immediately notice how smooth the food becomes in your mouth. However, I find that chewing 40 times takes an awfully long time and spoils my pleasure in eating. On the other hand, it’s fun to count how many times you actually chew. Or observe others you eat with and inform them about it. I suspect that many people chew less than 10x before swallowing.

♥ In my opinion you do an excellent job to chew 20 times. Good appetite! ♥

What about you? Do you quickly eat a sandwich while going on with your activities? Or are you aware of chewing your food? And, how is your abdomen?

Wishing you lots of fun with chewing for your health!
Mireille Mettes

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