A woman, who has been wolfing down her meals for a long time with an average meal time of only about 5 minutes, has lost the normal peristaltic function of her esophagus, making it unable to push food down for swallowing. Experts say that eating too quickly prevents food from being chewed sufficiently. Coarse, hot food particles can easily damage the already fragile esophageal mucosal epithelium, causing it to break down and trigger acute inflammation.
If inflammation forms scars on the esophageal epithelium, it will obviously affect its normal motor function, so it is not surprising that difficulty in swallowing occurs.
If you think that dysphagia and esophagitis are just "minor ailments," then the fact that eating quickly and consuming very hot food can easily induce esophageal cancer is a major problem. Linzhou in Henan is a high-incidence area for esophageal cancer, which is related to the fact that people in Linzhou eat quickly and their food is too hot.
Of course, chewing and eating slowly does not mean the slower the better, because digestive enzymes have secretion peaks, usually within ten to twenty minutes. During the peak secretion, the concentration of digestive enzymes reaches the optimal point for food digestion, which is beneficial for the decomposition and absorption of nutrients. If you eat greasy food, stimulated by fat, bile will be discharged from the gallbladder into the intestine all at once to concentrate on digesting fat.
However, if the meal time is too long, the bile will enter the intestine in batches. If the amount of bile is insufficient, it may not fully digest the fat, which can easily lead to fat accumulation and obesity. Therefore, both eating too fast and too slowly can lead to obesity. Director Zhang suggests that the best time for chewing and swallowing slowly for each meal should be about twenty to thirty minutes, which refers to the actual time spent chewing and swallowing, and does not include the time spent drinking and chatting during the meal.