Eating Too Fast Can Add Extra Pounds
Speed eating may be a big contributing factor to the obesity epidemic, according to Japanese researchers.
Researchers from Osaka University studied the eating habits of 3,000 people and found that speed eating could be enough to double a person’s risk of being overweight.
Their findings, reported in the British Medical Journal, show the importance of eating styles are to adding unwanted weight.
For the study, Japanese volunteers aged 30 to 69 were asked about their eating habits. About half of the men and a little more than half of the women said they ate until full. About 45 percent of the men and 36 percent of the women said they ate quickly.
Fast-eating men were 84 percent more likely to be overweight, and women were just over twice as likely.
Those who raced to finish their meals also tended to eat until they felt full, and were more than three times more likely to be overweight.
Professor Ian McDonald, from the University of Nottingham, said there are likely to be multiple reasons that eating too fast can cause extra weight.
"If you eat quickly you basically fill your stomach before your gastric feedback has a chance to start developing – you can overfill the thing."
He said that rushing meals was a behavior that might have been learned in infancy, and could be reversed, although this might not be easy.
"The old wives’ tale about chewing everything 20 times might be true – if you did take a bit more time eating, it could have an impact."
Researchers noted as causes both the availability of cheap food in big portions and habits like watching television while eating.
Australian researchers Dr Elizabeth Denney-Wilson and Dr Karen Campbell, said that a mechanism that helps make us fat today may, until relatively recently, have been an evolutionary advantage, helping us grab more food when resources were scarce.
In an accompanying editorial they noted that children should be encouraged to eat slowly, and allowed to stop when they felt full up at mealtimes.
"What the Japanese research shows is that individual differences in eating behavior underlie over-consumption of food and are linked to obesity,” said Dr Jason Halford, Director of the Kissileff Human Ingestive Behaviour Laboratory at the University of Liverpool.
The World Health Organization classifies around 400 million people as obese, 20 million of them under the age of five. The condition raises the risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart problems.
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