Chew on This ... Please!

The mouth is the place to exercise our freedom, through breathing, talking, chanting, eating, and drinking. To manage the mouth properly is to manage you life properly. ~ Michio Kushi, Father of Macrobotics

Chew before you swallow. ~ George W. Bush about his passing out eating a pretzelr

If to chew properly is a part of managing your life properly, then what’s that say for our electing a man who is chewing challenged?

No this isn’t me mounting a political soapbox. It is just my way of both leveling the playing field and making my point. Regardless of gender, class, race, creed, political practices or religion, Americans in general don’t make time to eat right, much less chew.

However, by carrying over our perpetual rush, rush, rush, don’t-have-time-for-my-American-life to our chewing, we are missing out on a great way to bring health and balance to our lives, no matter what we eat, according to Lino Stanchich, a certified macrobiotic educator, licensed nutritionist and chewer extraordinaire.

I would like nothing more than detail his moving personal story on how chewing saved his and his father’s lives. Buy his book, Power Eating Program: You Are How You Eat for that. Suffice to say, they both attribute surviving concentration camp environs to chewing. For now, I am passing bits of Lino’s food for thought on the matter for you to chew on.

According to Lino, chewing improves everything from energy, to confidence, to posture, to thinking, to sex! (Do I have your attention now?) Then there are the benefits to your health: weight loss, improved immunity, better digestion, rejuvenation and revitalization ….
Yes, all this just by resisting the urge to swallow.

How? Because digestion starts in the mouth in the following ways:
1. Chewing activates the salivary or parotid glands located in the corners of the jaw. These glands not only activate all the glands in the body, but they release the hormone, parotin, which is the hormone that helps strengthen the immune system by increasing T-cells—the cells the body needs to fight any infection, from the common cold to AIDS—and promote cell rejuvenation.
NOTE: Parotin can only be absorbed via the mouth. Once swallowed, it’s no longer available to the body.
2. The salivary glands produce ptyalin, enzymes that begin digesting food, especially carbs. Have you noticed the more sugar the food contains, the more saliva you generate? That is the ptyalin in the salvia mixing w/ the carbs (simple or complex), breaking them down, and beginning the essential, transformative and vital process of turning food into energy.
NOTE: Saliva heals! Licking or spitting on a small cut is your body’s innate instinct to speed the healing process. Also saliva reduces the acid of sugar, thus damage to teeth. Since more chewing promotes more salvia … need I say more?

In our society, where highly processed, high-sugar foods are cheaper and more readily available than natural whole foods, the benefits of saliva are overshadowed. Since sugar-laden foods create higher volumes of salvia w/o chewing, we got out of practice. As a result, we suffer accordingly: ï§ Poorly chewed grains are not properly broken down, meaning the nutrients, proteins and starches are not separated from the fiber and can only be partially absorbed by the small intestines. These unabsorbed, partially digested particles move to the large intestines, where intestinal bacteria ferment them. Fermentation produces excessive carbon dioxide and sometimes methane. The result: gas and bloat. ï§ Then there is meat. Human intestines are four times the length of carnivores; long enough to allowing our digestive tracts time to digest well-chewed high-fiber foods. However, decaying animal food needs to exit the body quickly. Because our intestines are too long to facilitate quick elimination, animal foods tend to remain in humans too long (longer if not properly chewed or accompanied by enough fiber), creating putrefaction, excess waste and fats, leading to the numerous cases of colon cancer Americans are experiencing.

According to Lino, “If you don’t want to chew, any diet will fail to produce the desired effect and may create gas, heaviness, discomfort and sluggishness. Poorly digested food can sometimes produce mental and emotional side effects such as irritability, moodiness and anger.”

All this can be avoided, and a whole lot more achieved, simply by chewing. And the affects of a new chewing regiment can be felt immediately. “Some have described feeling nausea, or experience a metallic taste, even cry…,” says Lino. “(T)hey are all indications that the body is detoxing, renewing itself.” In as little as three months of increased chewing, you may notice: ï§ Weigh loss – you eat ½ the amount of food, while at the same time increasing your energy levels twofold; plus the endorphins it produces lasts hours. ï§ Weight gain – If you are underweight, increased, longer and more thorough chewing improves assimilation of food by the body. ï§ Improved sex drive – reproductive hormones are included in the salivary gland’s activation of ALL hormones. ï§ Improved posture, organ function, confidence and thoughts – The average human has 32 teeth. We also have 32 vertebrae. Guess what? Each nerve in our teeth connects to each one of those vertebrae, connecting the effects of chewing to the spine, the spinal column, our posture, our organ function and our thoughts. Think about that the next time you are posed w/ the decision whether to root canal or not to root canal. ï§ Improved immunity and digestion, and a more youthful appearance.

So by gaining a bit more control over your bites, you might also manage to increase your creativity, your productivity and your vitality in your work and life.