You are what you digest.
When I was 20 I started practicing at a Zen Center, during retreats we would eat in complete silence. One became aware of the loudness of their spoon or even their chop sticks. Your chewing was so loud it reverberated in your head and the flavors so exquisite you couldn’t help but smile and be thankful. Most religions have the practice of giving thanks before eating and from an even deeper ancestral viewpoint eating is a very tribal activity. This is not a coincidence and human beings have evolved to intake food in this manner. These practices are a means of increasing parasympathetic tone, which is responsible for secreting salvia, bringing blood to the digestive track, releasing digestive enzymes, and stimulating the enteric nervous system (the gut’s brain – yes it has its own brain) to move the food we consume down the tracks.
“Do you know, children, why I eat in silence? These grains of rice and sesame are so precious, I like to eat silently so that I can appreciate them fully.”
-Siddhartha
People seem to debate about the usefulness or science behind microwaves. I have given this up. A microwave is a tool that irradiates food and heats it incredibly fast. Yet, our body’s are meant to smell food and anticipate it. Heating our food in a pan takes precious time and we start to salivate and prepare mentally and physically to eat. It is also an opportunity to stop rushing and just be thankful. We live in a fast paced culture and we all can get in the habit of being on our phone when we eat, finishing that last project during lunch. Yet, this is not how we are designed to encounter food.
The importance of parasympathetic activation in the digestion of food is not debated, it is in physiology textbooks stated as fact, because it is. Yes it involves words like the vagal nerve, cholecystokinin, acetylcholine, and enteric plexuses, but that is just our way of complicating something that is inherently simple and that we practiced culturally and unavoidably until the 70s or 80s when the pace of our lives increased beyond anything we have seen in human history.
One of the scariest things for me and many others is that folks eat really healthy on paper, but it all comes out the other end. They fill their toilets with very organic and expensive partially digested food. However, anything we don’t digest is food for the giant colonies of little microbes who reside in our our intestines and this can be a great thing or the death of you depending on how much and what they get. See how I am already making an inherently simple topic more complicated. I love the science, the anatomy, the fancy words, but the ancients had understanding without the complexity and they knew exactly what to do. Let’s get stupid. Let’s slow down. Let’s be together and simply eat in mindfulness, thankful that we are here and have this opportunity to pound some gainz.
“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh
By: Ben House, FDN, Ph.D. Candidate
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