Doctor Arnaud Cocaul, in his book "Régime mastication", shows that there is a real problem with "soft" foods. This type of food already processed by the food industry currently constitutes 70% of our daily meals. Dr. Arnaud Cocaul states that these easily digestible foods are certainly, for a large part, responsible for the overweight of our populations.

These foods, which are very well adapted to our modern world, are very easy to swallow, i.e. after only two or three chewing movements. The time lapse of a few minutes sufficient to swallow this type of meal, does not leave the brain time to release histamine, the hormone secreted in the 15 to 20 minutes after the beginning of a meal and which triggers the feeling of satiety.

In addition, chewing these foods requires very little energy expenditure to reduce them to a pulp before swallowing them, so they are no longer stored! Conclusion: for the same energy value, a soft food will have a higher caloric intake, because it will require less energy during digestion.

Dr. Arnaud Cocaul came to this conclusion by observing pythons, for which he collaborated with Richard Wrangham, a primatologist from Harvard University, and Stephen Secor, a biologist from the University of Alabama specialized in the physiology of the digestive system and metabolism. These researchers asked themselves the following question: do we spend more energy when we eat foods that are easy to digest? They then fed beef to pythons in 4 different forms: cooked and ground, cooked and whole, raw and ground or raw and whole. The researchers then calculated the amount of calories expended by the python to digest its meal. The results are surprising, as energy expenditure is 23% higher when digesting whole, raw meat. Thus, if we transpose these conclusions to humans, it appears that our body will spend more calories to digest a raw or rare steak than to digest a well-cooked ground steak.

This phenomenon was also verified in an experiment with mice. These researchers performed the same experiment with the four types of meat, but this time they monitored the weight of the mice. They quickly realized that mice that ate ground and cooked meat gained more than 30 percent in weight compared to those that ate raw, whole meat, with the same calorie intake. It seems that weight gain does not only depend on the amount of calories swallowed, but also on the preparation of the food.

So if you are concerned about your figure, just counting the calories swallowed is not enough, you must eat solid, raw, fresh, quality food, but especially chew for a long time to make your mandibles work!