Watching TV, sitting at your desk with your eyes on the computer, standing in front of the kitchen counter or even walking.
How many times have you had breakfast or lunch just like that, on the run, without giving yourself a few minutes of time to savor what you have in your hands or on your plate?
The dizzying pace of daily life and sometimes just pure habit leads us to eat too fast.
And while many people pay attention to what kind of food they put in their mouths, whether for weight or health reasons, less – or no – thought is given to the speed at which we eat.
However, the pace of intake has a direct impact on our health as it affects a number of properties of food as well as how the body responds to it.
Eating fast or slow “changes not only the speed at which food enters your stomach, but also the speed at which it enters your gastrointestinal tract,” Dr. Sarah Berry, a nutrition expert in the area of cardio-metabolic health at King’s College London, explains to the BBC.
“And that’s very important because it has a domino effect on the release of a lot of hormones that tell you how full you are, how hungry you are, and are also involved in how your body is going to process food,” she adds.
Same food, different results
One of the most visible differences is that people who eat faster tend to be overweight, have a greater accumulation of fat in the waist area and higher levels of LDL cholesterol (the cholesterol we know as “bad”).
That’s because they tend to consume more calories-an additional 100 to 200 calories-that contribute to weight gain, compared to those who eat more slowly.
“When you eat slower, there’s an increase in what we call satiety hormones (PYY, GLP1) that tell your body, ‘hey, you’re full,'” Berry notes.
At the same time, there is a “reduction in the so-called hunger hormones (ghrelin), and that limits the desire to eat more,” the researcher adds.
How is it possible for the same meal to have such a different impact by changing only the speed of intake?
According to Berry, there are two reasons.
The first is that satiety signals take between 5 and 20 minutes to reach the brain, so if you eat quickly, since these signals have not arrived, you can continue eating without realizing that you have already eaten enough.
The second is that, by eating slowly, “the release of nutrients in the intestine is slower, and that means that there is a more sustained and prolonged release of the hormones that tell you that you are full and a more prolonged suppression of the hunger hormones that tell you to eat”.
Glucose
To demonstrate the differences arising from the speed of intake, Berry conducted an experiment with BBC health and science correspondent James Gallagher.
After fitting him with a monitor to measure his blood glucose concentration, he asked him to start exactly the same thing for two days (a breakfast of cereal and fruit, a lunch of salad with bread and a dinner of chicken and vegetables), one day very slowly and the other much more quickly.
When the results were analyzed, it turned out that the response was much greater on the day he ate fast.
“When you eat your food much faster, the carbohydrates stimulate the release of insulin, but insulin is not released fast enough to remove the glucose from your bloodstream, so it has a greater response when you eat fast,” says Berry.
“And this is important because we know that these large spikes in blood glucose, if repeated in excess over the years, can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, vascular disease and other metabolic complications,” he adds.
If you are used to eating fast, changing your eating habits is not easy, but one of the most effective tricks is to rest your silverware on your plate between bites.
Another is to make a conscious effort to chew your food more.
And finally, another recommendation that also has many other benefits is to reduce the amount of ultra-processed foods in favor of those that are less processed.
This is because the texture is usually softer in highly processed foods, and this difference in texture causes them to be consumed at a faster rate (between 30% and 50% faster).