Welcome to the Ask a Nutritionist podcast, brought to you by Nutritional Weight and Wellness.

We are thrilled to have you join us today as we discuss the connection between what you eat and how you feel and share practical real-life solutions for healthier living through balanced nutrition.

Now let's get started.

Hello, and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's midweek

segment called Ask a Nutritionist. My name is Leah Kleinshrode. I am a registered and licensed

dietitian with nutritional weight and wellness. And on today's show, I will be answering a

question about one particular topic that we've received from our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

This listener asks, why is it important to take the time to properly chew foods?

What are the benefits to chewing our foods well?

So thank you for that question. And I love this question, actually,

because this gets into how we eat our food, which I think is overlooked and tends to be kind of an

underappreciated aspect of our eating experience, underappreciated in how it actually makes

our bodies feel during a meal, during a snack, and how we feel after we finish that meal or

snack. I'd argue that how we eat is equally important as what we choose to eat.

So that is what we typically address on dishing up nutrition and at nutritional weight and wellness is, okay, how can we make the best choices possible for our bodies?

But we also have to think about how we eat and how we are taking that food in.

One kind of little side note as I was putting together

some thoughts on how to answer this question, I came across this term called eating hygiene,

which I thought was just kind of an interesting term. We often hear about sleep hygiene. That was

the first thing that came to my mind, which is just, you know,

what does our sleep environment look like? Do we sleep in a cool room? Is it dark? Do we have a

face mask on? I mean, all sorts of things. Like, how do we cater our sleep environment to optimize

...