by Joan Kent | May 2, 2016 | Health and Wellness
Are your mouth and jaw getting the food workout they need? Here’s why we should eat — rather than drink — our food and chew it thoroughly.
Chewing Starts the Digestive Process
Digestion begins in the mouth. Saliva contains amylase and lipase, enzymes needed for starch and fat digestion.
Adequate chewing increases saliva to lubricate food, which eases its passage through the esophagus when we swallow.
Chewing signals the GI tract to prepare for food. The stomach makes gastric juice, comprised of enzymes, hydrochloric acid, and other substances. The pancreas prepares to secrete enzymes and bicarbonate into the small intestine. Extra saliva relaxes the pylorus so food can exit the stomach and move into the small intestine.
Enzymes and stomach acid work on the surface of food only. Chewing increases the surface area available for them to work. That’s especially important for the digestion of protein, which has many functions in the body.
But all foods need to be chewed small enough for stomach acid to further reduce them in size. That enhances bioavailability, the faster release and fuller absorption of nutrients and fluids into the GI tract.
In fact, most of the foods we don’t chew enough tend to be carbohydrates, such as bread and rice. They absolutely need amylase for digestion, but can be easy to swallow without adequate chewing.
Dogs eat carbs the right way. A dog will simply swallow meat; its digestive system can process meat in that whole state. Give a dog a piece of bread, though, and the chewing begins.
But back to humans…
Chewing Increases Satiety, the Had-Enough Feeling
Sensors throughout the GI tract monitor nutrient levels and the amount of chewing, tasting and swallowing involved in a meal. Giving your mouth and jaw a good food workout can bring on fullness signals sooner.
Foods with harder, crunchier textures — apples, raw broccoli, carrots, celery — require more chewing. They also provide more nutrients than semi-soft fats, or junk foods. So choosing foods that require lots of jaw action could lead to greater satiation — which ends the meal — and satiety, how soon we want our next meal.
Chewing longer helps to raise glucose levels. Those in turn raise insulin levels. Insulin is involved in satiety and feedback loops that end a meal, again marking chewing as a key satiety factor.
What About Hormones?
Chewing thoroughly helps to release higher levels of CCK (cholecystokinin). CCK is a powerful satiety hormone, so releasing more of it can decrease appetite for a longer time.
CCK is released primarily when we eat protein and fats, but its satiety function tends to be specific to carbs.
The chewing-and-CCK connection could help vegans, for example. They often have strong cravings for carbs generally and sugar in particular, due to their low protein intake and low levels of CCK. Chewing foods for a longer time could help vegans eliminate sugar cravings by increasing their CCK levels. (So could more protein, but that’s another article.)
Then there’s ghrelin, truly a monster hormone. It increases appetite and decreases energy expenditure. Yikes. More chewing increases satiety by decreasing levels of ghrelin.
In a country that produces 3950 calories per day for every man, woman and child, no one needs more ghrelin. So if simply chewing longer can reduce ghrelin levels, by all means chew longer.
Longer chewing time appears to be more important than gastric volume — the classic signal of satiety — when it comes to the feeling of satiety.
Chewing May Help With Weight Loss
In a research study, participants consumed 150 calories prior to serving themselves from a buffet meal. The ones who had been given a pre-meal snack of solid food ate about 150 calories fewer from the buffet, compared with controls.
Those given the 150-calorie snack in liquid form, though, did not decrease their meal size.
Eating fast, taking large bites, and swallowing quickly after less chewing are behaviors that tend to be associated with overeating and higher body weight.
Hard foods (raw broccoli and the like) may decrease bite size, while soft foods (ice cream, cake, pudding) tend to increase bite size. Hard foods also require more chewing, slowing down the meal.
Another study compared pizza chewed 40 times with 15 times per bite. Chewing longer left participants feeling less hungry, less preoccupied with food, and with a decreased desire for food.
Chewing 40 times per bite also increased plasma glucose and insulin, which increases satiety, as described above. So longer chewing time may decrease food intake at a given meal.
But the longer chewing time did not decrease intake at the next meal, given 3 hours later.
Not surprisingly, longer chewing needs to be repeated at each meal to reduce calorie intake successfully.
Chewing May Increase Dining Pleasure
Chewing is a large part of mindful eating, which includes savoring the aroma, anticipating each bite, and experiencing each bite fully. Longer chewing releases more flavors from foods, and longer contact with the taste buds may lead to greater satisfaction with the meal — as well as a greater sense of fullness and satiety.
All of this can decrease the total amount of food eaten at a meal. The pleasure from a given food decreases during the meal. It’s commonly referred to as the “satiety cascade,” but I learned it in science journals as “aliesthesia,” a decrease in a food’s palatability as hunger subsides.
Staying more aware of the change in taste sensation by chewing longer could focus the meal on quality instead of on quantity. That may be particularly true if and when the meal slows down.
Again, choosing harder foods with crunch and texture will take longer to eat and may contribute to increased satisfaction with the meal.
Increase Your Oral Processing Time (Say What?)
Keep food in your mouth longer. Here are guidelines.
– Eat when you’re physically hungry so your body is really ready for food.
– Include plenty of harder, crunchier foods, like vegetables.
– Take small bites.
– Don’t chew right away. Hold the food in your mouth for a moment or two before starting to chew.
– Slow down. The method that seems to work best is to start the meal at a normal rate until the initial hunger has passed. Then slow to about half speed.
– Chew longer! This may be an individual thing that takes some explanation:
Apparently, we don’t like chewing food more than we have to, and that can vary with a given food. In the pizza study above, researchers postulated that 40 times per bite changed the characteristics of the food enough to make the food less appealing and decrease appetite.
Maybe it’s necessary to get used to this new eating practice by counting at first. Once the habit is there, instead of counting chews per bite, just chew till the texture of the food — not the taste — no longer reveals what the food is. For example, if you can distinguish between a broccoli stalk and a floret in your mouth, you need to keep chewing.
Whatever your reason for chewing more — better digestion, better health, greater dining pleasure, increased satiety, weight loss — all can start with this one change.
“Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.” — Horace Fletcher (1849-1919)
by Joan Kent | Apr 18, 2016 | Health and Wellness
Many tips are said to stop cravings — for sugar and other foods. Recently, Judson Brewer, M.D. gave a TEDMED talk in which he proposed “curiosity” or increased mindfulness as possibly the definitive cure for a craving or an addiction — regardless of the type of addiction.
It brought to mind several things. I’ve encountered a wide variety of cravings cures over the years. Some of them seem to come from the viewpoint that cravings are imaginary, all in your head.
My research on food and brain chem has suggested that cravings might well be all in one’s head — if that means “all in one’s brain.” My understanding of cravings is that they’re often neurochemical, making them physiological and quite real.
Does that mean mindfulness or curiosity won’t work? As I’ve written in other posts about other things, almost anything can work for some people.
So I do believe that mindfulness could be the answer to cravings for those people, at least sometimes.
How Can Mindfulness Help Food Issues?
Mindfulness could be one answer to such things as reducing food intake and eliminating overeating. Stopping long enough to figure out if you really need the dessert you’re tempted to eat, or the extra portion you want, is a wise thing to do. Is it about actual hunger or the appetizing look of the food? Stress? Boredom?
A few years ago, I read a brief description in a fitness industry journal about a weight-loss plan that involved eating approximately 500 calories a day, two days a week. Because I suspected that some of my clients might have been tempted to try it once they’d heard about it, I wanted to be able to discuss it with them knowledgeably. So I tried it for a week.
On the days that followed the very low-calorie days, I noticed that I felt quite in touch with all aspects of my eating: food selection, portion sizes, meal timing, even rate of consumption.
I didn’t continue the plan because my workout schedule was too rigorous to make 500-calorie days practical, but the observations I had made were interesting. Since then, I have indeed heard from a few people who have tried similar plans. They incorporate anywhere from 5 to 9 very low-calorie days in a month.
Their reports echo my personal observations. They’ve told me they feel more mindful of their eating, and that examining their state of mind before letting themselves eat out of habit helps them make changes — all without white-knuckling, willpower fatigue, or other conflicts. Some have said it changed their relationship with food and eating.
So Let’s Get Back To Cravings
Assuming anything I thought I knew about food cravings is true(!), cravings can be brought on by a decrease — for various reasons that I’ve covered in other posts — in specific brain chemicals.
In that case, is observing the craving with curiosity truly the mindful thing to do? Might it even be considered a lack of mindfulness?
Perhaps the mindful thing to do would be to address the low levels of those brain chemicals and restore them.
That’s why I typically recommend liquid B-complex. It can eliminate a craving in a matter of minutes by giving the brain the co-factors it needs to re-establish optimal levels of the chemicals involved in craving manifestation.
Again: mindfulness, like anything, can work for at least some people, at least some of the time. But what if you’re in a situation where a craving hits and there is not adequate time (or even an opportune moment) to sit and observe it till it subsides? Or what if you need to concentrate on your work without distraction?
I can attest that it takes equal discipline to reach for liquid B-complex when you’re feeling as if you’d kill for a brownie.
And I submit that getting the brain back on track within a few minutes could be the mindful behavior that addresses the immediate cause of the craving.
As for other eating behaviors, mindfulness could be ideal.
More permanent cravings elimination can be accomplished through changes in food. If you’d like to get rid of cravings permanently, I’d be happy to help. Please visit www.FoodAddictionSolutions.com/Coaching and request a free Food Breakthrough Session. No obligation!
by Joan Kent | Apr 11, 2016 | Engage Your Students, Health and Wellness
My last post covered food intolerances and the changes that occur over time, from the acute reaction to a more chronic one.
The immune response to a triggering food involves a release of stress hormones, opioids, such as endorphins (beta-endorphin), and chemical mediators like serotonin. The combination can produce temporary symptom relief through the analgesic action of endorphin and serotonin, plus mood elevation and a feeling of relaxation.
In that way, eating the triggering food may make someone feel better almost immediately and even think the food is beneficial.
Endorphin release typically involves a concomitant release of dopamine. The combination of those two brain chemicals and serotonin forms what I’ve always called the “addictive package.” Avoiding the addictive food could lead to withdrawal.
After long-term use, someone may eat the triggering food not to experience the pleasure of the chemical “high,” but to relieve the distress and withdrawal without it. It’s almost textbook addiction.
How Does Intolerance/Addiction Affect Health?
As someone addicted to a triggering food continues to eat more of it, the immune system must keep adapting, and may become hyper-sensitized, reacting to more and more foods — especially those eaten together with reaction-triggering foods, or with sugar.
The constant demand on the immune system can lead to immune exhaustion and degenerative reactions, depending on genetic weaknesses. The signs and symptoms listed above are just a start.
Sugar can be a major player in this because it causes inflammation in the body and makes it more susceptible to food reactions. Eating triggering foods plus sugar can make it even more likely that new reactions will occur.
I recall an old book by Nancy Appleton (Lick the Sugar Habit) who suggested that eggs might trigger reactions in many people because they’re so frequently eaten at breakfast with orange juice. Cake is another example: sugar plus wheat, eggs, milk.
As the addictions continue, cravings occur, probably leading to increased consumption. As more and more foods trigger an immune response, the result may be malnutrition, as explained in the last post.
Stats say that rates of food intolerances are rising. My theory is that it’s at least partly due to sugar in our diets — including sneaky sugars that are often viewed as healthful, such as agave, fruit, fruit juice, and sweeteners.
Stopping the Cycle
Definitely give up any foods you suspect may be causing any reactions — even if you love them. Think about foods you eat with those triggering foods on a regular basis, and consider eliminating those, as well.
Above all, avoid sugar. Follow this plan for 3 weeks, something J.J. Virgin also recommends.
In the meantime, you may have cravings. If so, use my proven, time-tested recommendation of a teaspoon of liquid B-complex (complete B-complex) to kill the craving within minutes.
At the end of the 3-week elimination, you should be feeling — and looking — much better.
by Joan Kent | Apr 5, 2016 | Health and Wellness
Before my doctoral program — which required me to narrow down to a specialty (sugar addiction) — I had studied food intolerances.
Many books on the subject start with food reactions, then move into chemicals in our homes and offices, gasoline fumes, and more. Important as those reactions are, they’re not about nutrition.
My interest in food intolerances has always been their link with addiction.
Recently, I “attended” a webinar by J.J. Virgin, whose first book (I believe) was on food intolerances and how to eliminate those foods to improve health and lose weight.
The webinar re-sparked my interest in food intolerances and addictions. Common intolerances include chocolate, corn, soy, wheat (or other gluten-containing foods), peanuts, dairy, eggs, sugars and other sweeteners.
What Does Food Intolerance Look Like?
Signs and symptoms can include headache/migraine, joint pains, fatigue, sleepiness, heart palpitations, depression, irritability, stomach pains, bloating, and many more.
Because digested food moves through the bloodstream, the effects of an intolerance can show up virtually anywhere in the body.
Food intolerances might be the same every time the food is eaten, such as a rash.
Or the reactions might vary — say, a non-itchy rash one time and itching with no rash another time.
The reaction might be cumulative. Maybe a small portion of the food causes no reaction, but a portion eaten again that day, or several days in a row, causes a reaction.
Addiction is another possible reaction that may develop over time.
What Causes Food Intolerances?
The causes are many, but let’s keep it simple.
One cause is a genetic intolerance or a tendency toward it.
We can become intolerant to a food that we eat often or in large quantities. Overeating a food uses up enzymes specific to digesting that food, so complete digestion is prevented.
That may result in improperly digested food particles moving through the digestive tract and bloodstream, triggering an immune reaction. The undigested, unabsorbed food provides no nutrients.
We can also become reactive to a food that we eat together with another triggering food. So the list of triggering foods may grow, resulting eventually in malnutrition.
Food Reactions May Change Over Time
The guiding principle of the human body is homeostasis.
When a trigger food is first eaten, the body attempts to restore homeostasis by ridding itself of the offending food. It prevents absorption by attaching antibodies to the partially digested food while it’s in the intestine. That might successfully eliminate the food before it can pass into the bloodstream.
If the food does enter the bloodstream, it can trigger inflammation. The acute reaction may be short, and the body may return to homeostasis quickly.
If someone continues to eat a triggering food over time, the body undergoes an adaptation. The immune system may become slower (or less able) to respond. The reaction may now manifest more slowly than the acute reaction. Signs or symptoms may last longer, sometimes hours or days.
[Part 2 will cover how a food intolerance can become a food addiction.]
by Joan Kent | Mar 14, 2016 | Health and Wellness, Zone based Heart Rate Training
In a previous post that I co-wrote with Jim Karanas, we described specific physiological adaptations of aerobic — aka cardio or endurance — training.
As you may recall, they include increases in blood volume, tidal volume, and stroke volume. The capillary network increases, as well, as do the size and number of mitochondria. Other changes also occur, but these are the ones that move oxygen to the working muscle.
Recent research has shown that endurance/cardio exercise — not strength work or interval training — can make rodent brains bigger.
Okay, forget how much that last part sounds like the plot of a 1950 sci-fi film. Let’s look at other research.
A long-term study followed 1,583 middle-aged men and women with no personal history of either dementia or heart disease over 2 decades. Before-and-after tests done 20 years apart showed that the ones who had kept in shape tended to have larger brains, while the poorly conditioned participants had lost gray matter.
Holding on to gray matter prevents cognitive decline and decreases the risk for dementia. No specific type of exercise was explored in that study, however.
And that leads us to the long-raging debate over Cardio and High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).
HIIT Advocates Always Stack the Deck
Let me be clear: I have absolutely nothing against high-intensity intervals. I use them often in my own workouts and when teaching.
But something interesting occurs when staunch advocates of HIIT compare the relative benefits of HIIT with those of standard cardio.
They tend to cheat.
In the hands of the die-hard HIIT fan, the word “cardio” has become code for lame-o exercise at the lowest levels of intensity. It should come as no surprise that the benefits — if any — of such lame workouts would fall far short of the benefits of HIIT.
And no one challenges the criteria. So let’s challenge them.
You Can Go Hard AND Long
It’s simply not true that intense training must involve short intervals of, say, 20 to 60 seconds. If you train well aerobically — and train seriously enough to achieve the aerobic benefits above — you can maintain a high level of work for a pretty long time.
HIIT advocates seem to ignore the fact that elite marathon runners, for example, run faster than 5-minute-mile pace for 26.2 miles. Most people would find it difficult, if not impossible, to run a single 5-minute mile. It’s a fast pace. Elite marathoners go faster than that for a couple of hours.
As Matt Fitzgerald — well-known marathoner, trainer, and author of several books and many articles — states, “well-trained endurance athletes really don’t have to slow down much as they increase the duration of their efforts. We are not the folks reading magazines on elliptical trainers.”
I’m the furthest thing from an elite athlete you can find, but even I have done a couple of cycling time-trials on Mt. Diablo. The first one took me 44 minutes at a consistent heart rate of 173 — quite high for me, making the climb a combination of hard and long. (Okay, I told you I’m no elite athlete.)
The training combination that appeals to me most is to fit a set of about 8 intense intervals into a long training of moderate or moderately high intensity.
It’s not just my personal preference, though. Evolutionary evidence suggests that this way of training is precisely what we were always meant to do.
(Part 2 will explore the evolutionary reasons that this is what we’re meant to do.)
by Joan Kent | Feb 22, 2016 | Health and Wellness
About a year ago, I received questions from a man in my email community. They were good ones, so I devoted part of a seminar to them.
“I want to know how food can create low mood and low energy. I mostly want a methodical way to fix things. I'm also interested to know if your tastes can change over time so that you'll like good foods.
“As someone who has never really had high mood or energy for the better part of 8 years now despite trying many exercise programs, diet is really my last thing to try. It would be nice to have some idea what can happen.”
Overall, low mood or energy is probably the result of how the foods we eat can affect glucose and brain chemistry.
I’ll simplify (oversimplify) and keep the answer to three basic aspects: glucose, serotonin, and protein.
Food Affects Glucose, Mood and Energy
Some foods can cause large fluctuations in blood glucose. The result can be a pattern of sharp rises in glucose, followed by sharp drops. Some people are highly susceptible to those fluctuations, so they feel good when glucose is up, and crummy when it’s down.
The most important factor in the glucose drops is not how low, but how fast, it falls.
Those fast glucose drops can bring on a variety of symptoms in susceptible people. Some symptoms may be physical (headaches, low energy), some may be emotional (irritability, depression, mood swings), and some may be mental (confusion, decision-making difficulties). Yet all of them — and many more — may be related to glucose peaks and valleys.
Foods that can trigger big glucose fluctuations are typically junkier carbs, such as cookies, cakes, pastries, white flour breads and other products — or even combinations of starches and saturated fats (potatoes with butter, for example).
Food Affects Brain Chem, Moods and Energy
If someone who’s carb-sensitive — defined as exaggerated insulin release in response to certain carbs — eats lots of junky carbs, he/she can make lots of serotonin. It’s linear: big insulin means big serotonin production. We’ll skip the mechanism because I’ve covered that in previous posts, and in my book.
We know that serotonin receptors can and do down-regulate — for example, in response to anti-depression meds that target serotonin levels.
Down-regulation is a decrease in the number of receptors plus a decrease in the sensitivity of the ones that remain. The result? Serotonin won’t work as well.
That’s why dosages may need to be adjusted over time.
Now, to my knowledge, no one has researched serotonin receptor down-regulation with respect to food.
But ever since I did the research for my dissertation, I’ve had a theory that such a down-regulation of serotonin receptors might very well occur in carb-sensitive people who eat lots of junky carbs, such as sugar. Call it an educated speculation.
If that’s the case, it would explain rotten moods resulting from a less-than-optimal diet.
And That Brings Us Back To Protein
Protein in your diet allows you to make the brain chemicals — serotonin is only one — that boost mood and also prevent cravings for junk.
Protein contains the amino acids to make brain chemicals that make us feel alert and mentally energized.
Protein triggers hormones that produce satiety and decrease the desire for carbs. Both can help prevent overeating junky carbs that trigger low energy and low moods. The same hormones can also prevent continuation of a poor diet that may cause those undesirable effects.
I’ve pushed the benefits of protein many times. No discussion of energy, mood and food would be complete without it.
Eating “good” fats will also help to boost mood, but I vowed to keep this to 3 oversimplified points. So let’s save fats and mood for another post….
