How to Eat (To Get the Most Out of Your Food)

The question of what to eat has all but occluded the equally important, but seldom discussed matter of how to eat. Believe it or not, when it comes to weight loss, how you eat matters just as much as what you put in your mouth.

Oh, Hello Regret!

In all likelihood, you think a lot more about eating foods than about digesting them. But that's an oversight that can affect your overall nutrition and health. Your diet may be full of berries, spinach, quinoa, and salmon, but unless your body is efficiently breaking down and absorbing those foods, you're not getting their full benefits.

The digestive process is complex. It starts with enzymes in your saliva that break down the starches in your food as you chew. Acids in your stomach activate enzymes that dismantle proteins. Next, the food travels to the small intestine, which breaks down fats and absorbs most of the nutrients that are ferried into your bloodstream. Good digestion and nutrient absorption go hand-in-hand.

However...

There are tons of impediments to good digestion — dietary issues, food sensitivities, and even a poorly timed workout. But far more common than all of these are your eating habits.

Do wolf your food down without chewing?

In what order do you eat the foods on your plate?

The answers to these questions could have a greater impact on your ability to lose weight, and keep it off, than you might think. Here are some health hacks for getting the most out of your meals (and your digestion!):

Eat Your Salad First

If you’ve been to Italy or France, you’ve probably encountered the strange custom of eating a salad at the end of your meal. Post-meal "salades" supposedly help with digestion and with the tasting of wine.

Far be it from me to challenge the food traditions of another culture. It is, perhaps, true that a vinaigrette sweetens the taste of white wine and intensifies the notes of bold red. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to digestion, the tradition doesn’t hold up to science. Eating your salad after a heavy meal — especially if it contains fruit — is a great way to wind up with indigestion in the short term, and a cumulative malabsorption of essential nutrients that leads to weight gain over time.

You can think of your digestive tract as a one-lane highway. Let’s say you eat a 600-calorie helping of beef bourguignon and chase it with a Nicoise salad. Because meats digest much more slowly than fruits and veggies, that beef bourguignon acts like an 18-wheeler, clanking and grinding its way south to your small intestine. Your salad, on the other hand, is the digestive equivalent of a sports car — flashy, top down, railing along at a buck twenty. So what happens when the salad catches up with the meat?"

Crash!

That feeling of guttural discomfort — the one that makes you want to topple over on the couch — is textbook indigestion. And that’s not the worst part of it...

Eating your salads/raw veggies at the end of a heavy meal leads to malabsorption of the very nutrients that make them worth eating. Those consumed at the end of a heavy meal are locked in a digestive traffic jam, oxidizing quickly. By the time the salad reaches your small intestine, where nutrient absorption happens, its building blocks are so denatured that a person eating two raw salads a day can still be deficient in all the essential vitamin and mineral groups.

Such a deficiency results in reduced cellular energy, insulin resistance, and ultimately weight gain. Read this article to learn how.

At the end of the day, we eat for enjoyment — that should never be forgotten. If variety is the spice of life, then food is... well, the food. But nor should we forget that food is also the first medicine. No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated by any other means.

Chew, Your Stomach Doesn’t Have Teeth

When he turned 109 years old, Mohammed Mohyeddin of Toronto, Canada, was asked about his secret to a long life. He replied: "Food should be liquified in the mouth and then go into the stomach. Your stomach doesn't have teeth."

Never a truer word has been spoken. When you take the time to properly chew your food, you will eat more slowly, and far less, but still feel full after your meal.

Hunger is partly controlled by the part of your brain called the hypothalamus, by your blood sugar (glucose) level, by how empty your stomach and intestines are, and by certain other hormone levels in your body. 

Chewing your food gives your brain time to register that yes, in fact, you are eating and to send a signal that you’re full once you’ve eaten enough. It typically takes about 20 minutes after your first bite of food for your brain to send that signal — so the more slowly you eat, the less likely you are to over eat.

When it comes to eating raw veggies, extensive chewing also releases the nutrients trapped inside plant cells. As you probably know, plant cells have a cell wall with an external matrix of "cellulose," an organic polymer that gives plants their structural integrity. Breaking into that cell to access the starches, for digestion, is like trying to break into Fort Knox. As a frame of reference, it takes an herbivore — whose stomach has evolved for such activities — approximately four days to break down and metabolize these cells.

So... chew, your stomach doesn’t have teeth!

Thorough Chewing Can Heal Leaky Gut

"Leaky gut" isn’t a diagnosis doctors learn in medical.

Although we aren’t always sure what causes leaky gut syndrome, the end result is typically the same: It leads to malabsorption of essential nutrients. In other words, you could be eating the highest quality organic ingredients, but if your gut isn’t primed to digest and make use of them, you’re wasting your time and your money.

How does chewing help to heal leaky gut?

First of all, nutrient dense foods contain a long list of enzymes that aid in their proper digestion. This is a miracle of evolution. It’s as though some foods have evolved, specifically to be eaten by humans.

Raw foods — meaning any food in whose preparation heat has not been applied — have full enzymatic activity. When properly masticated through chewing, those enzymes are "jail broken" from the food cells and directly enter the small intestine for absorption, rather than hanging around in the stomach with meat, oxidizing and denaturing.

While you may not have control over what's being served up for Christmas dinner, being more mindful of how you eat will save your gut and prevent weight gain this holiday season.