Why meal speed can be as important as the type of food – 04/08/2023 – Equilibrium

Watching TV, sitting with eyes on the phone, standing in the kitchen or even walking.

How many times have you had your breakfast or lunch like this, in a hurry, distracted, without giving yourself a few minutes to enjoy what you have in your hands or on your plate?

The rhythm of everyday life and sometimes simply bad habits make us eat too quickly.

And while many people pay attention to what kind of food they put in their mouth, whether it’s for weight or health reasons, they tend to think less — or not at all — about the speed at which we eat food.

However, the pace of intake has a direct impact on our health, as it affects how we receive the properties of food, as well as the way the body responds to them.

Eating fast or slow “changes not only the speed at which food enters the stomach, but also the speed at which it enters the gastrointestinal tract,” explains Sarah Berry, nutrition specialist in cardiometabolic health at King’s College London.

“And that’s really important because it has a cascading effect on the release of a lot of hormones that tell you how full you are, how hungry you are, and also hormones that are involved in how your body is going to process food.”

Same food, different results

One of the most visible differences is that people who eat faster tend to be overweight, accumulate more waist fat and have higher levels of LDL cholesterol (the cholesterol we know as “bad”).

This is because they tend to consume more calories — 100 to 200 more — in one meal than slower eaters.

“When you eat more slowly, there’s an increase in what we call the satiety hormones (PYY, GLP1) that tell your body, ‘hey, you’re full,'” explains Berry.

At the same time, there is a “reduction of the so-called hunger hormones (ghrelin), and this limits the desire to eat more”, adds the researcher.

How is it possible that the same meal has such a different impact, just because of the speed of ingestion?

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 fast, those signals don’t have time to arrive and you keep eating without realizing you’ve had enough.

The second is that by eating slowly, “the release of nutrients in the gut is slower, and that means there’s a more sustained and prolonged release of the hormones that tell you you’re full, and a longer suppression of the hunger hormones that send you eat”.

Glucose

To demonstrate the resulting differences in speed of intake, Berry conducted an experiment with BBC health and science journalist James Gallagher.

After connecting him to a device to measure his blood glucose (amount of glucose in his blood), the team asked him to eat 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), but one day he should eat slowly and the next quickly.

After the informal experiment, it was found that the blood glucose was much higher on the day when he ate quickly.

“When you eat much faster, the carbs stimulate insulin release, but the insulin isn’t released fast enough to remove the glucose from your bloodstream, so you have a greater response when you eat fast,” says Berry.

“We know that these large spikes in blood glucose, if repeated in excess over the years, can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other metabolic complications.”

If you are used to eating fast, changing the habit is not easy, but one of the most effective tricks is to put the cutlery on the plate between mouthfuls.

Another is to make a conscious effort to chew your food more.

And finally, another recommendation is to reduce the amount of ultra-processed foods. That’s because their texture is usually softer, and this feature makes them consumed at greater speed.