I recall hearing in the past that after you chew your food 19 times your mouth releases a chemical in your saliva that makes your stomach think your full.
Now that I think about it, this sounds like total bull. Anyone have The Straight Dope on the matter?
I expect the delay caused by chewing the food 19 times is quite a significant factor; as far as I understand it, the system that tells the brain that the stomach is full is quite slow to react, so if you eat really fast, you can end up overtaking it and eating too much before you actually feel like you’ve eaten enough.
Chewing does stimulate the secretion of saliva and saliva does contain digestive enzymes though.
Research has determined the average person chews their food 14.235 times before swallowing, with a standard deviation of 4.287. However, results from empirical medical studies and finite element analysis models conclude that that the optimum number of chews is 13.562. Therefore, chewing exactly 14 times before swallowing is the optimum number of chews.
[sub]Or I could be full of baloney.[/sub]
My WAG (a WAG which I have given considerable thought, being a professional cook):
First, for some background, there was a longstanding bit of eating ettiquette in Japan that called for eating a mouthful of rice in between every mouthful of something else - eat mouthful of rice; eat bite of meat; rice; mouthful of veggies; rice; meat; rice, etc, ad nauseum. The origin of this bit of ettiquette was a famine. Meat and vegetables were scarce, while rice was reasonably plentiful. So by alternating between mouthfuls of rice and other food, a person would “fill up” quickly on the rice, and not need to eat as much of the other items. The tradition continued for centuries after the famine was over.
Likewise, the American “chew your food X number of times” concept originated during the Great Depression. When food was scarce, chewing X number of times did indeed allow the stomach to get the “full” signal without actually eating a lot of food. This helped with the need to divide a small amount of food between several people. Also, the adults in the family were able to shovel more food into themselves while their children were obediently masticating their first couple mouthfuls.
Even after the Great Depression was over, those people who were raised during that time (like my grandparents) continued the practice, similar to the way the Japanese maintained their tradition. The habit was passed on to their children (baby-boomers. my parents), though it seems to have not made its way to my generation so much, probably due to the relative affluence of the country in my lifetime.
I started thinking on this topic a couple years ago when I served a scrambled-egg breakfast to a regular customer in a restaurant. This was a customer who always took an eternity to finish a mean, so I watched him eat his scrambled eggs, and counted chews. He chewed a single mouthful of scrambled eggs 52 times! I think this guy probably chewed his coffee too.
Of course, the Great Depression is also the source of the parental admonition, “Clean your plate! Don’t you know there are starving children in China/Africa/India?” That particular bit of “wisdom” is one early cause of the trend toward obesity in the USA. Seriously, I’ve read accounts of elderly, overweight people who only manage to start losing weight when they have an epiphany and realize that they really don’t have to eat the whole thing. As Dear Abby once said, “Despite what your mother may have told you when you were young, cleaning your plate is not going to help anybody in Africa.”
According to D. Lindsey Berkson’s book Healthy Digestion the Natural Way each bite of food should be chewed 20 times.
IIRC, chewing mixes the saliva enzyme alpha-amylase throughout your food.
The enzymatic action of amylase ends once the digested food reaches the small intestine.
And the feeling of hunger satiation takes around 20 minutes to kick in.
So eating slowly is supposed to be healthful for a few different reasons.
OK, she’s got a master’s in nutrition, but she practices chiropractic.
Sure, I’ll take her nutritional advice without question…
NOT.
If she’s so insightful about nutrition, then why isn’t she a professional nutritionist or researcher? And if she were a board certified nutritionist, you can bet she would have included that in her bio.
I seriously doubt she’s done any research on this… does she cite any investigations, or is it just her professional opinion?
If you think about it. the whole idea of counting food chews is totally anal… chew until your food is ready to swallow. Your reptilian brain knows how to eat, fercrissakes.
And why just one number? Jello you might chew once… soggy cereal, three or four times… a bite of steak from that cut-rate steakhouse that serves meat that tastes suspiciously different from all other beef you’ve ever been served… chew it 30 or 40 times.
You may be a great cook, but your history lacks savor.
“Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.” said Horace Fletcher, author of The ABC of Nutrition, published in 1903. In this book he commanded people to chew each mouthful of food 32 times, once for each tooth.
Fletcher had a huge following and wrote several other books on “Fletcherism” or slow chewing, by which he lost 60 pounds in five months in 1898.
The method does for some people appear to fool the stomach into thinking that more food is received than actually eaten, so quite possibly it was revived during the Depression. But it started a full generation earlier.
Oops, sorry in answer to your question
I haven’t read of a link between digestive enzymes and hunger satiation. It is probably the eating slowly that does the job.
Digestive enzymes, according to what I have read, basically aid in the digestive and absorption process of the gastrointestinal tract & work to reduce possible indigestion.
bughunter I have no idea if Berkson has practiced as a dietician or a nutritionist. But as you said she does has the training to be one.
According to the Commission on Dietetic Registration, the credentialing agency for The American Dietetic Association, dieticians and nutritionists are only required to have a Baccalaureate degree degree and then must acquire certification.
And yes, Berkson includes footnoted documentation in the text of her book Healthy Digestion.
One of my relatives has a master’s degree in nutrition as well and was a Registered Dietician, but she declined to keep up her certification after she left the field because she would have to accumulate 75 hours of continuing education credits every 5 years.
But she still knows a bit about nutrition.
I agree chewing food a certain number of times sounds anal, but if you have gastrointestinal disorders it drives home the point that one should chew food thoroughly.
Chew your food until you can safely and comfortably swollow. All of this business of counting. . .next someone will ask how long to sit on the toilet.
Dude, I only chew my food once.
15 minutes.
well hroeder if you are sitting on the toilet and you push too hard too fast it is possible to give yourself a hernia
point in case? i’m just curious anyway, someone must have come up with a number based on the scientific method
thanks for all the replies so far 
alterego, is it possible that you meant hemorrhoid instead of hernia?
hrm, i think i meant hernia
you can’t give yourself a hemmorrhoid can you? IANAD but i believe you get a hernia from the strain
Straining at stool is probably the leading cause of hemorrhoids.
http://www.bleeding-hemorrhoids-cure.com/hemorrhoids-causes.htm
According to the book Fitonics and according to Stuart McRobert’s Beyond Brawn, chew until it is a paste. This will ease the digestive process.
I also recall somewhere an old Chinese work had prescribed chewing it two hundred times. I tried this and by about forty I had nothing left in my mouth because it had been deconstructed into such tiny pieces that they all just kind of actively dispersed all the way into my stomach.