Properly chewing food ‘not always best for your health’

WELLINGTON - The age-old advice to properly chew your food is not always best for your health, Canterbury researchers claim.

Marco Morgenstern and colleagues have been on a six-year mission to discover what foods make us feel satisfied and how best to eat them.

They found that taking bigger bites and chewing less was better for people watching their weight as the food was broken down more slowly in the stomach.

This meant people felt fuller for longer and the slow release of energy could be burned off over time.

However, sportspeople would be better off eating softer foods and chewing for longer.

“The way people chew the food depends more on the food’s properties, not the individual, so you can design food which people won’t chew much and [food they] will chew a lot,” Stuff.co.nz quoted Morgenstern as saying. (ANI)