The first thing to understand is that digestion is a process that begins in the mouth, not in the stomach as most believe.
When you eat your food too fast, you unknowingly inhale excess air, which contributes to your belly ballooning out.
Also, you swallow larger chunks of food that accumulate in your stomach while it works harder to digest them. This can lead to a gaseous buildup.
However, when you mindfully chew your food rather than gobbling it up, you break it down into more easily digestible bits, and it has time to absorb saliva and enzymes from your mouth necessary for smooth digestion in the stomach.
Regularly chewing gum leads to excess air passing through the mouth to the stomach. The air then gets trapped in the digestive tract, leading to bloating.
Furthermore, the constant chewing action and air passing are signals telling your body that your stomach is about to receive food.
This activates your digestive system, and when the stomach fails to receive any food, it leads to symptoms like acid reflux and gaseous buildup-induced bloating.
You don’t have to be a chain-smoker to feel bloated up from cigarettes. Even 1 or 2 cigarettes a day are enough to cause excess air inhalation that travels down to your stomach and gets trapped in your digestive tract.
According to the U.S. National Institute of Health, many harmful chemicals enter your body when you smoke.
These chemicals weaken the muscle that connects the stomach and the esophagus and is responsible for preventing food from flowing back into the esophagus from the stomach.
When this muscle doesn’t function properly, it can result in heartburn and increased gas buildup, leading to bloating.
Sodas, soft drinks and fizzy pops are everyone’s favorites. The carbon dioxide in these drinks gives them the fizz that we all enjoy. It’s also what causes bloating in your stomach.
Drinking too much soda floods your system with an excess of carbonated gas. Your system deals with this by belching some of it out and passing some out through the anus. However, some gas gets trapped in your digestive tract along the way, causing your stomach to bloat.
Furthermore, many of these carbonated drinks contain artificial sweeteners that your system does not identify and, therefore, does not easily digest.