Episode 274: Eating Hygiene with Hallie Bulkin

Hello friends and welcome to episode 274 of the Untethered Podcast. This is your host, Hallie Balkan and we are going to dive into eating hygiene today. So stick with me because this is one of the foundations of having incredible health and really focusing on good habits and creating those habits. Let's dive in. Quick Disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis.

And or medical treatment of a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host, Holly Balkan. I'm a certified myofunctional therapist, feeding specialist, podcaster, business owner and mentor. This podcast is all about getting your questions answered and collaboration collaborating with colleagues.

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Let's get started.

Okay, so obviously the Untethered podcast is not just about tether, old tissues and myo and airway. It's also about pediatric feeding. And truly these are. These are skills that are appropriate at any age. And I don't want to say skills, but more so behaviors. And so this is going to be a super quick episode. It is July 2024. Can you believe I've had this podcast going since July or June? Really? Actually I think it was June of 2020. 2019, so to say. 2020, 2019. Holy moly. So I'm going to give you like three tips and they're probably all things that you've heard before, but they're super important when it comes to eating. And these, these actually popped up recently. I was so excited to see this pop up under, under the topic of eating hygiene with the. We had this like Discovery Day where we did this onboarding or intake I guess, if you will, with Carrie Jenkins, who is the functional medicine professional that we're working with and she's just amazing. I really love her stuff. As I'm going through all of her modules, I'm like, yes, yes. And more yes. Like so good. All of it is so good. But anyways, she had these three simple Tips. And so I am sharing those with you today because it's absolutely what we also preach in feeding right? And feeding therapy. Now, one of them, I know the first one even I think that some people are going to say, oh, you don't really need to do that. But I think if we're talking about healthy habits, it is something that we should work on doing right? And that is, number one, sitting down to eat your meal. Right? And a snack can be a meal. So another thing that I want to highlight is that. And this is not one of the tips, but. But, you know, children and adults, many of us eat like, or should eat like six times per day, like, every so many hours. And sometimes those meals might be larger than others. Some might be smaller. So some of us call them breakfast, snack, lunch snack, dinner, dessert, or snack. Right. I have the reframe of just calling them meals, meal, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And not focusing so much on, like, oh, it's the morning, so we should eat X. Oh, it's the evening, so we should eat Y. We want to get a lot of our carbohydrates, and this is not meant to be a nutritional episode per se, but we want to get a lot of those earlier on in the day, right? Like, not the heavy, complex, you know, carbs, like, right before we go to bed or like in our last meal or two of the day. But in American culture, we typically do eat those at the end of the day. And that's how my household is operated. And I am so inflamed because of it. So we are changing things up. But sitting down to eat your meal is a very healthy habit. And look, I know some people are going to say, oh, it's fine if you stand. That's fine. It is. Okay. But from a purpose of sitting down, relaxing, you're actually shifting, like, your nervous system, okay, into a parasympathetic state. And that optimizes your digestive process. So there is a reason why we have chairs and tables. And again, it may not be perfect for everybody. And I'm not saying to force somebody, don't strap a kid down if they won't sit, but if it's a child or an adult who has the capability of sitting down, and it's not something that's extremely uncomfortable or challenging for them, then it is a good idea to sit down to eat your meal. And I'm really speaking to people like myself who may stand at my kitchen counter and shovel food in between calls or the next work thing or going to get my kids or whatever, if I even remember to eat right. And so that's, like, I said, what I'm working on. But there is, like, a sciency side behind sitting down to eat your meal. And so that's what I wanted to share with you all, because it. That is something I've even noticed. It's so interesting. Lily likes to stand, or she likes to have, like, one knee on a chair and then her other leg is on the floor. She's always. She's always wanted to do that. Or like, she would stand on the chair when she was little, or she, you know, not even on her knees, like, actually standing on the chair. And she would do this in restaurants. She would do this in our house, like, always, always, always standing. And she's got a little bit of a, you know, anxious side to her. I've noticed recently that, you know, Mia has started to stand while eating, which is just very interesting because she's never been a kid who's done that before. And this is like, I'm talking in the last, like, three, four weeks, this has started. And I'm like, where is that coming from? And then I get this. Eating hygiene as part of her protocol. And it's like, sit down to eat your meal. And I was like, oh, all right, now, okay, Mia, we're gonna sit down, because I know that you can. And then the other two tips, which are simple, and again, you've probably heard this before, refrain from drinking a ton of water while you're eating. Okay. While you're eating a meal, it's fine to take a sip and kind of cleanse your mouth out, like, occasionally. We don't wanna do that between every bite. We've talked about that here on the podcast. That's not. When you wanna get in your daily hydration, a lot of us, I think, forget. And here I am with my water. So I'm gonna take a sip. It's locked. I'm not going to take a sip. I'm going to unlock it and take a sip. A lot of us, I think, sometimes forget to drink. And that is why there is this culture in the United States of America where people walk around with these massive. As I'm holding this in the video, if you're watching these massive cups, right, They're Stanley cups, they're brumate cups. Whatever other cups there are out there, I like the brumate ones because personally, I like the inside of them. I like that there's a metal straw on the inside and that the. There's no concern over some of the other concerns that Stanley's have had recently, but that's neither here nor there. Not the point of this podcast. You want to be drinking your water throughout the course of the day. And so, like, Mia at 6 years of age was just. We were advised that she should be drinking 24 ounces of water per day. We don't drink like sodas in my household. Like, we drink like sparkling water seltzer. Like Spin Drift is big in my house, but we don't drink like a lot of juices. Occasionally I'll let the kids have a juice, but it's like the Honest Company, right? Which those are like watered down juices. You're getting less sugar, which is a great thing if you're choosing to have sugar. My kids will ask for this stuff. Like, Mia will come over and say, can I have an apple juice? Like, she asked me this last night and I think she's tired. She's in a full day of camp right now. And I said, well, let's think about what we had today. And I said, what did you have that was like, sweet today? And so she told me about, like, that she had an Italian ice at camp because she can't have the ice cream, so they give her Italian ice. And she named like one other thing. I said, well, I think that's, I think that's enough sugar for today. And it's close to bedtime. We don't really need all that sugary energy, right? Also, I knew we were going to do some tart cherry juice in her smoothie, but totally irrelevant to her, right? So I didn't really talk about that at the moment. I just said, let's have some water. And I let, I will let her have a Spin Drift. She just kind of got into the whole Spin Drift thing. And I know there's a whole controversy over like bubbly drinks and whether or not those are good for your gut and yada yada. But like, we just can't eliminate everything, people. So I am, you know, I will give my kids like a small cup of water at dinner, like a small mason. They're like the small glass mason jars and a little silicone sleeve kind of thing that I got off of Amazon with like silicone straws. I will give my kids those with some water in it at dinner because I don't want them filling up on water. I want them to eat the food, right? Food is energy. And so the more water that you drink, the more you start to dilute your stomach acid as well, and your digestive enzymes, which is what I just learned from Carrie. And so you want to hydrate your body throughout the day and not at meal time. Right. At mealtime, if we have to liquid wash everything down, you need to call a speech language pathologist who's trained in feeding, whether that's pediatric or adult, based on your age or the age of the patient. Right. And have them help you if you're feeling like you have to wash every sip down, that is not. It's not common or normal. It's not typical. Right. So we can help you with that. We can help you kind of figure out why that's happening. But a lot of our kids will use liquid to wash things down. And so we get a lot of parents who call and they'll say, oh, well, my kid just drinks so much milk, especially at mealtime. Well, one, we can choose to give them water. Right. Easier said than done sometimes with certain, you know, kiddos. I know that. But two, we can also, if you are going to give milk or water or juice or whatever, you can also limit the amount, Right? You can just give them a couple ounces instead of like a big old bottle full of it or a whole big cup, give them a smaller cup so it looks full, but it holds fewer ounces. And then, you know, hey, they'll just have only so much that they can fill their belly with during mealtime. Also keeping in mind that children's stomachs are smaller than adults and they can only hold so much in general. And so again, if we fill that with liquid, they're going to feel fuller, faster, they're going to eat less of the food on their plate. They're not going to have as much energy. And again, as Carrie mentioned, you dilute your stom acids and digestive enzymes, which tend to. I wanted to share that because we get a lot of kids who graze, who eat throughout the day, who drink as they're eating everything, who are just like picking here and there. And so they're never really getting hungry because they're kind of always keeping that hunger cue at bay. But they're still not getting enough nutrition. They're nutrients, right? They're not getting enough calories. Usually when you graze, especially when a child is grazing throughout the day, they typically are not getting enough nutrients or calories. Okay, we see that. And we tend to see a lot of these kids are very lean looking, sometimes having a hard time putting on weight. Right. As they get older. We've had some of those cases. So if that resonates with you. Again, a feeding therapist can help. And then the third tip is to chew thoroughly. I think we've all heard that we should chew. You know, I, I commonly hear people say you should chew 20 times right before. For swallowing your bite of food, Carrie recommends 25 chews. And basically the reason behind that, too, right? It's not just that we're breaking the food down and making it easily digestible just by, like, mashing it up, which I think is what a lot of people assume we're doing. It's. It allows the amylases in your saliva to begin breaking down, especially in the carbohydrates. And so, you know, you can put your fork down or your spoon down between bites to kind of help you remember to chew enough. And we can teach our children to do this, but we need to be slowing down. We are not. We should not be racing through mealtimes. And again, we want to be in that rest and digest, that relaxed state, right? That parasympathetic nervous state. Chewing, breathing, swallowing, like we talk about a lot on this podcast. They're like Carrie describes. I mean, as she said, they're continuous repetitions. And she says you're, you're maximizing the digestive process when you sit down to eat your meal, when you refrain from drinking too much, and when you chew thoroughly, like 25 times per bite. All right, so again, this is just more of that eating hygiene. Hopefully this is helpful for some. Some of you may know this, especially those of you who are feeding therapists, but I wanted to just highlight this information because I do think it's so important, and I think it is something that maybe a lot of us don't know or a lot of us don't stop to think about or remember on a regular basis. So there you have it. Quick episode this week. I hope that Everybody in the US has a fantastic July 4th, and we will be back with another episode next week. This is Hallie signing off.

Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you found value in this episode and want to hear more of these Myotots, Airway and feeding related episodes, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode on your social media platforms. You can access free resources and all I offer@halliebulcan.com or pop over to Hollybulcin on Instagram to get all the latest updates.