Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinagel and today

I have some new research on an age old question. How does chewing affect your nutrition?

But first, I did want to answer a question that I got from Sonya in regard to my recent

episode on artificial sweeteners. She wrote, after listening to your recent podcast about

artificial sweeteners, I finally decided to try to kick my addiction to artificially

sweetening everything. If I've been having a lot of artificial sweetener and I've now

cut it out of my diet, how long will it take my gut microbiome to repair itself? Well,

Sonya, the good news is that the gut microbiome responds relatively quickly to changes in

the diet. Now, I haven't seen research on precisely this question. That is, how fast

changes in artificial sweetener intake would change the microbiome. But other research

shows that changes in the diet such as decreasing meat or increasing vegetables and whole grains

can alter the makeup of the microbiome in just a few days. Now, of course, if you want

those changes to be sustained, then those dietary changes need to be sustained as well.

So keep me posted on how that goes. And now here's a question from Heather about chewing.

A lot of magazine and internet articles recommend chewing every bite of food, 30, 40, even

up to 80 times. And supposedly increasing the number of times will help you lose weight.

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

there are nutritional benefits to chewing your food extremely well. So is any of this true?

Although this does sound like one of those nutritional urban legends. I'm always debunking.

Chewing your food more thoroughly can, in fact, improve your digestion. It can promote weight loss.

And it does affect the nutritional value of foods in ways that you might not expect.

Digestion, of course, does not begin in the stomach, but in your mouth. And chewing your food

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