Eating with your hands triggers nerve endings in your fingers that prime your digestive system, something cutlery blocks. The Bhagavad Gita warns against food that's too hot or cold, feedback your hands naturally provide. Hand-eating also forces focus on the meal itself, improving digestion.
Eating with hands, this is something that our scriptures have been talking about since time immemorial. There's 3 main reasons for this. Number one, our fingers have nerve endings, and as soon as we touch our food, there's a signal that goes from our fingers to our brain. So our brain gives a signal to all our digestive organs, so they get lubricated, versus when we eat with cutlery, that signal is broken. The second thing that eating with hands does is can't touch something too hot or too cold. In the Bhagavad Gita, it is mentioned that when we eat food that is too hot or too cold, it doesn't do us any good. And number 3, there's a concept called mindful eating. When we eat our food, we should fully be with our food. We sometimes joke about it that we humans are so funny. All day we think, what am I going to eat for lunch? What am I going to eat for dinner? But when we're actually sitting on the lunch table or the dinner table and we're having our lunch, we're thinking about everything but our meal. The best way to eat is eat undistracted, which means that if there's anything which is taking a mental toll on you, your body's energy is then split between here and here because you're having to process a lot of that information.
