Recent Science News mentions a study that says that more chewing increases the thermic effect of food, which is equivalent to reducing food calories.
So, does chewing slowly really help you lose weight?
Is there any reason for the concern of diabetic patients that "chewing slowly will raise blood sugar"?
Let's analyze it today.
you feel warm after eating
because of the "thermic effect of food"
Before talking about the impact of eating on weight loss, let's first popularize the concept of "food thermic effect".
Simply put, the body heats up more after a meal than before a meal.
This effect makes the body feel warmer after a meal.
Many people have this experience in winter. Before eating, they feel very cold when they are hungry, and when they are full, their body is warm and not afraid of the cold.
To put it another way, the existence of the thermic effect of food means that part of the heat of the food eaten is dissipated as heat, and this part can no longer be used to grow fat.
Eating more chewing can burn more calories?
In fact, it is only ten thousand calories, it is better to control the food intake
Some friends may be very happy: it seems that if you eat high-calorie food, you can eat it with confidence as long as you chew it more!
Don't be too happy too soon.
Because compared with the calories consumed by chewing more, when you eat a few more bites, the increase in food calories will be far greater than the calories consumed by chewing.
For example, an adult female with light physical activity has a daily energy intake of 1800 kcal.
For a meal of more than 600 kcal, chewing more can only consume more than a dozen kcal, which is negligible.
However, that doesn't mean chewing a lot doesn't make sense.
Studies have suggested that this chewing strategy may be especially effective for obese people and those who have difficulty controlling their food intake.
Because of the same amount of food, when you deliberately increase the number of chews, you can reduce your appetite and avoid overeating, which is more certain.
Chew more food
Helps develop healthy eating habits
In fact, there are many beneficial effects of eating to increase chewing.
First, chewing food more can help make it easier to taste food.
Generally speaking, those fast foods are very salty, because when chewing and swallowing quickly, the taste buds have no time to appreciate the original taste of the food, and it is too late to fully appreciate the salty taste, so the taste must be heavily seasoned to feel delicious.
Chewing more can also make people better appreciate the deliciousness of the food itself, without the need for so many salty and sweet condiments.
The more chewy the rice and steamed buns are, the sweeter they are, and the original vegetables have a refreshing sweet fragrance when chewed carefully.
Second, for the same food, if you chew it more carefully, it is not only beneficial to digestion, but also easier to control appetite.
Oral processing is the beginning of the digestive process.
Food is chewed and mixed with saliva to form a bolus.
Saliva contains a small amount of enzymes, especially salivary amylase, which can digest a small amount of starch.
There are pepsin in the stomach, they act on fish and eggs, and can release a small amount of amino acids and small peptides.
Therefore, chewing food finely makes it easier to produce "early digestive products".
These small molecules will "report" to the body, letting the body know what it has eaten, so as to release the relevant digestive juice in a more targeted manner, and inform each organ to prepare for processing the corresponding food components, so that digestion and absorption are smoother.
Third, chewing a few more times and prolonging the time of eating also gives the brain more opportunities to understand how much it is eating.
Otherwise, if you eat too fast, the brain does not have time to fully feel full, and you have already ingested too much food. It will be too late until the "physical receptors" in the stomach feel bloated and then stop.
The real easy to gain weight is
foods that are easy to chew
It should also be emphasized that the so-called chewing more has two levels of meaning: one is to increase the chewing of the same food, and the other is to eat more food that needs to be chewed. Both are meaningful.
When choosing food that needs to be chewed to swallow, you don’t need to deliberately control the number of chews. You only need to choose the right food, which will naturally slow down your eating speed.
The ones that really make people gain weight are those that are particularly easy to chew, easy to swallow, and eat quickly, such as biscuit cookies, cake mousse, bread and custard buns...Which one is chewy?
The things that carb lovers love, the foods that you can binge eat, are foods you can swallow quickly.
Conversely, foods that require more chewing tend to be less likely to be eaten.
For example, raw carrots, broccoli, greens, oat grains, etc.
Compared with brown rice such as black rice and red rice, compared with refined white rice, it is obvious that you need to chew more times before you can swallow it.
The same is meat, the soft and juicy meat with fat infiltrated into the shredded pork, and the lean meat that needs to be chewed hard, which one is easier to eat?
If you don't believe me, think about the taste of pork belly, ribs, fat sheep and beef, and then think about the taste of chicken breast and beef tendon.
Diabetics can chew more food
No need to swallow dates for blood sugar control
The effect of more chewing on postprandial blood sugar is relatively uncertain. At present, most studies have not found that more chewing can reduce postprandial blood sugar, and even for carbohydrate foods, more chewing may increase the blood sugar variability in the pre-digestion stage, making it difficult Blood sugar rises slightly earlier and lowers slightly earlier.
After chewing, the food particles are smaller, better digested, and more fully acted by salivary amylase, so the blood sugar of carbohydrates should rise faster.
But one experiment showed that there is not much difference between different chewable carbohydrate foods, such as rice and rice cakes, if calculated by the area under the blood sugar curve.
Maybe some people will be a little disappointed. It turns out that chewing slowly can't reduce the blood sugar response?
In fact, don't despair, the results of these studies at least show that chewing more does not make your blood sugar response higher.
Therefore, diabetics can also chew food seriously, and do not have to swallow the dates in order to control blood sugar.
In short, chewing slowly and reducing the speed of eating can not only allow people to better appreciate the taste of food, but also help people control their appetite, and also reduce the need for salt and sugar seasonings.
Choosing foods that need to be chewed can also help people better control their food intake.
It is true that chewing carefully is good for health and also helps prevent obesity.
Text / Fan Zhihong
(Director of Chinese Nutrition Society, chief expert of science communication hired by China Association for Science and Technology)