Stop and smell the food, save the roses for later!

There is so much to talk about with digestion- where to start? Well I know the mouth is the obvious place, so lets start there and work our way down, like a good limbo.

Most people assume the first stage of digestion is chewing or placing the food in our mouths. However, digestion actually starts well before that. It begins with us thinking about food, day dreaming about food, smelling food and preparing food. Yes, chopping those carrots or washing that spinach is actually going to assist our digestion by stimulating the brain to send the s.o.s signal to some lovely sublingual glands in your mouth so you start producing saliva, a message to your stomach lining specifically the parietal glands to start cranking out the stomach acid (hydrochloric acid), pepsin and wake up the pancreas to produce some digestive enzymes, so your personal cauldron is ready to cook up whatever you place in it. For this reason and many others its not great to ‘throw’ food down your throat. Preparing your food has shown in several studies to decrease our food intake, increase our satisfaction, improve digestion and decreases incidence of reflux. However, we cant always be in the kitchen preparing our food, can we? So this is where, taking even a few minutes or seconds, to think about the food you will be eating, smelling it,looking at it, observing it, ‘taking in’ what you are eating and of course chew (at least 20 or 50 times), so your body is ready for the food lovin’. It really is true  the simple things make a big difference. 'Stop. Look. Smell. Chew.' maybe its not going to be the next slogan posted on the side of a bus but its an easy one to remember, so you can enjoy the benefits of a very intelligent digestive system.