I ask all my clients to chew or at least suck on their supplements long enough to taste them. The purpose of this is not to gross you out or offend your culinary sensibilities. It is simply to let your body duplicate at the biochemical molecular level what you have put into it. Chewed, your body can fully duplicate and understand how to utilize these rare and valuable nutrients.

At first chewing supplements can seem to be a hassle; and it is a slight hassle. I found that if I just stuck in a mouthful and chewed my body would just keep chewing. Your body likes them. They are not sugar coated, and you have been trained into experiencing a sugar coated food world. Try to get by this. It is a step toward true health.

Your taste buds, and for that matter your sense of smell, have a purpose of informing some functions of the brain and the endocrine system that such and such arrived and is headed for the stomach and will be available for metabolizing soon. The endocrine system runs metabolism. Metabolism is all the functions of creating the physical body, tearing it down and rebuilding it anew continually as well as providing the raw materials for energy production. This is all done on a cellular level. You could even say that metabolism is the common denominator of physical life on earth.

Chewing supplements improves metabolism. The first steps of metabolism are called digestion. Chewing of food is the first step of digestion. While you chew, spit, or more properly saliva, is mixed with the food. This saliva starts to digest carbohydrates as it contains amylase, an enzyme, which digests simple sugars and complex sugars. Carbohydrates are these sugars simple and complex.    

Tests were done on people who could not chew and swallow their food for various reasons and therefore were being fed liquefied food through a tube directly into the stomach. These people were not thriving or recovering their health. These people were given food to chew and spit out. It was the same food as the liquefied food. When this chewing was done, the people began to recover. The conclusion drawn from this experiment was that it is important to chew or taste the food consumed.

I wondered why this was true and looked at my anatomy books. There are nerve lines from the taste buds to part of the brain as well as a second line to the boss of the endocrine system called the Hypothalamus gland. The physical biochemical communication from the taste buds is indeed being sent to the endocrine system that coordinates and drives metabolism.

So, now you know that if you swallow the supplement without tasting it the benefit will be limited. You can actually get by with just tasting the supplement; but chewing is definitely superior.

If you think these whole food concentrates taste poor; try chomping down on synthetic B-complex or other synthetic supplements. Supplements primarily come as liquids, tablets, capsules or perles. Liquids are easy to taste. Tablets can be crushed by the teeth or sucked on a little. Perles can be bitten till some of the fluid leaks out and then swallowed. Capsules can be bitten through and some of the powder tasted, then swallowed. If you want to really minimize the taste, get a glob of saliva in the mouth and bite the supplement in this glob so you control the amount of supplement that touches the taste buds. This does take a smidgen of skill but is easily mastered. You can also chew with a mouth full of water, grind up the supplements into yogurt or pour the powder from the capsule into a blended drink. These approaches dilute the taste significantly or completely. Get the most out of your supplements and chew them.