Hi, this is Monica Reinagal, and you're listening to The Nutrition Diva, quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

And today I'm going to talk about some of the claims you might have heard that chewing each bite of food a certain number of times will help you lose weight or maybe improve your digestion.

A lot of magazine and internet articles recommend chewing each bite of food 30, 40, even up to 80 times, Heather writes. Supposedly, increasing the number of times will help you lose weight.

There's even an iPhone app that will track your chews. A colleague of mine also claims that

there are nutritional benefits to chewing your food extremely well.

Is any of this true?

Well you're right Heather, this does sound like one of those nutritional urban legends I'm

always debunking, but chewing your food more thoroughly can improve

digestion, promote weight loss, and affect the nutritional value of foods in ways you might not

expect.

Digestion doesn't begin in the stomach, of course, but in your mouth.

And chewing your food more thoroughly can improve digestion in a number of ways.

First, digestive enzymes in your saliva start to break starches down into

simple sugars. In fact, if you chew on a saltine cracker or a bite of bread for

long enough without swallowing it, it will actually start to

taste sweet. By chewing for one minute, up to half of the starch may be

digested before you even swallow.

Your saliva also contains some fat digesting enzymes that help begin the process of breaking

down the fats in your food and the act of chewing food, including the stimulation of your taste and smell receptors,

also triggers the production of stomach acid and pancreatic juices further along the digestive tract

so that the whole system is primed for the digestive sequence.

And finally, chewing well breaks the food down into smaller pieces.

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