Japanese Study Finds Chewing Helps Weight Loss

The pace of modern life has accelerated, more and more office workers choose fast food to reduce eating time, eating faster and faster, especially for surgeons, sometimes a meal needs to be resolved in a few minutes, but this is not good for health. A study recently published by Tokyo Institute of Technology shows that in the case of eating the same amount of food, people who eat slowly have to consume more energy after the meal, which shows that chewing slowly when eating not only helps digestion, but also helps weight loss. A research team led by Tokyo Institute of Technology professor Naohyung Hayashi conducted the experiment. They asked 10 men with an average age of 25 to keep quiet for 20 minutes, then ate a block of food with a calorie content of 300 kcal, and compared the calorie consumption when they ate as quickly as possible and chewed as slowly as possible. The data showed that when the test subjects ate as quickly as possible, they spent an average of 1 minute and 43 seconds and chewed 137 times, while when they chewed as slowly as possible, they spent an average of 8 minutes and 17 seconds and chewed 702 times. The team measured the oxygen uptake of these individuals during quiet time, while eating and 90 minutes after eating to calculate diet-induced body heat production, and examined blood flow in the celiac and superior mesenteric arteries. It was found that if the food was eaten as soon as possible, the calorie consumption was 7 calories per kilogram of body weight for 90 minutes after the meal, but if the food was chewed until the lumps disappeared and then eaten again, this value was 180 calories, a significant difference. Also, blood flow in the digestive tract is significantly increased during slow chewing. In addition, the same results were shown in the case of eating food with a caloric value of 100 kcal. According to the research team, this indicates that the more chewing is done than swallowing in one gulp, the more activity in the mouth stimulates more active digestive and absorptive activity in the body, and so the more calories are burned. In the case of a person who weighs 60 kilograms and eats three meals a day, there is a difference of about 11,000 kilocalories in diet-induced body heat production per year, which is equivalent to 1.5 kilograms of fat, due to the difference in chewing. Eat slower, not only can lose weight, but also prevent cancer, chewing slowly has many benefits, in fact, should change their eating speed and way.