How does chewing food affect your body's ability to release the chemical energy of the food?

1 Answer
Sep 16, 2017

Chewing helps in breaking down food in small fragments and also in increasing the suface area for action of enzymes on food.

When every particle of food is acted upon by enzymes, all its components become available for absorption. This means proper utilisation, i.e. the body gets to absorb maximum nutrients available in the food that was eaten.

  1. Chewing allows the saliva to mix well with food and salivary amylase (=ptyalin) can work better on an increased surface area. Amylase breaks down cooked starch into maltose and isomaltose within oral cavity.
  2. Chewed food, mixed with saliva, is easily swallowed. Inside digestive tract (in small intestine to be specific), maltose and isomaltose is further broken down into glucose.
  3. As chewing helps to digest mainly carbohydrate (starch) portion of our diet (by action of salivary amylase), we get to absorb more of glucose. Glucose is used during cellular respiration to release chemical energy.

So proper chewing means better action of ptyalin on starch (=polysaccharide), availability of more glucose (=monosaccharide) to body, and hence availability of more enegy.

Chewing also helps in better digestion of proteins and fats for the reasons mentioned in the beginning. Essence of this answer is represented in the following diagram:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Catabolism_schematicsvg