Chewing & Mastication Diets

The digestive process begins as soon as you spoon, fork or shovel that food into your mouth. Your meal gets physically broken down by your gnashing teeth while your spit helps moisten and chemically dissolve the food. Chewing calmly and slowly can prevent overeating and stomach discomfort, but there's hardly evidence that an extra amount of chewing leads to weight loss or nutritional benefit. When your throat wants to swallow, you're good to go.

Normal Chewing

• Salivary amylase and other enzymes in the mouth begin breaking down food as soon as it enters the mouth. Starchy foods like bread and potatoes especially need this process to be prepared for the gastrointestinal tract. The appropriate amount of chewing varies for different foods, but you've chewed enough when your body involuntarily swallows the food. Wet foods like oranges barely need any chewing, while beef jerky requires plenty of mastication.

Eating Slowly

• While you eat, the body releases peptides, which are hormones that trigger the feeling of being full. Studies by the American Dietetic Association, British Medical Journal and others found evidence that eating slowly can lead to a healthier diet by preventing you from overeating. However, the amount of actual chewing does not appear to have connections with these findings; taking pauses throughout your meal provides the same benefit.

History of Fletcherizing

• In the late 19th century, an American named Horace Fletcher championed an extreme chewing diet called Fletcherizing. The diet had such popularity, historian Jennifer Michael Hecht notes, that dinner parties of the time were strangely silent with all the chewing going on. After British prime minister William Gladstone offered advice to Fletcher that food should be chewed 32 times (once for each tooth), Fletcher went back to America and promoted even more aggressive mastication. Henry James, Upton Sinclair and other notable figures proudly endorsed Fletcherizing for decades.

Legacy of Fletcherizing

• Scientific evidence ultimately failed to prove health benefits of Fletcherizing. Those who enjoyed it either felt a placebo effect or simply appreciated their food more. One ill effect of the fad seemed to be constipation. Fletcher advocated spitting out whatever didn't get swallowed after all the chewing, and perhaps this resulted in loss of moisture and mucin, another element of saliva, that helps with digestion. The constipation of Fletcherizers propelled William Kellogg to develop a subsequent fad diet of cereal and enemas.