Library of Blogress: Healthy Living Information

Nature’s laws cannot be broken with impunity. The penalty of violated human laws is often hinged upon the fact of the transgressor being found out, but there is not even this chance of escaping the just punishment demanded from transgressors of the laws of Nature.

Nature demands that you must enjoy your food to the very fullest extent. The pleasure of eating should be so great that it blots out everything else for the time being. It should literally absorb your entire attention. Every worry in reference to business, or other trouble, should be discarded absolutely from the mind. If you are not able to discard all these interferences with your dietetic enjoyment you are eating without sufficient appetite, and you should immediately cease, and wait for an appetite which will enable you to completely lose all external thoughts in the pleasure of satisfying this natural demand of the body.

Then sit down to feast. Eat very, very slowly. Try to see how much enjoyment you can extract from every mouthful of food. Retain it in the mouth, chewing vigorously all the while, until it is absolutely reduced to a liquid, and until it is swallowed involuntarily. Gladstone’s rule of chewing every morsel thirty- two times before swallowing is practically no guide for you. Even the soft foods, like mashed potatoes, for instance, will have to be chewed from thirty to fifty times in order to reduce them completely to a liquid, and to extract all the delicacy of flavor. Dwell on every morsel of food as long as it is possible to retain it without involuntary swallowing. As the morsel is submitted to the chewing process it gradually grows richer in flavor, more delicious to the taste, and the process should be continued until the maximum of this delicacy of flavor has been reached. Not until then is the food ready to be transferred to the stomach–not until then do you really get the richest, most delicious flavor of what you are eating.

Digestion begins in the mouth. The thorough chewing and mixing of the food with saliva is, consequently, one of the principle and important factors in digestion. All foods in a natural state require a great deal of chewing before they can be swallowed, but the various methods of preparing food, by which it is moistened and softened, usually enables one to swallow it with but little chewing. It there- fore behooves us to remember this prime necessity for thorough mastication, no matter how soft the food may be. Even soups must be submitted to a certain amount of this chewing process, that the saliva may be thoroughly mixed with it before it is swallowed. Food is not in a fit condition to enter the stomach un- less it is first thoroughly masticated and mixed with saliva. The necessity for this is almost universally ignored, and diseases of the digestive organs, both chronic and acute, from which human beings suffer almost universally in civilized countries, is ample evidence of the sins that are being committed against the stomach.

Eating without appetite is unquestionably a serious sin–there can hardly be a greater sin against the digestive organs–but the sin of deficient mastication undoubtedly comes next. In the previous chapter I mentioned the importance of the thorough enjoyment of all food taken into the stomach–how this ability to enjoy every morsel eaten not only aroused the salivary glands to vastly increased activity, but every one of the juices that assist in the mysterious process of digestion were made to flow more freely under those circumstances. Now, food cannot be thoroughly enjoyed if not thoroughly masticated. Thorough mastication is what produces this enjoyment–is what arouses the sense of taste to its highest capacity, and most delicate acuteness. How much enjoyment does one derive from eating when the food is hurriedly bolted? Practically, none. Read the rest of this entry »