For as long as I’ve been feeding myself – which, by the way, is several decades now – I’ve been feeding myself. to eat. I take big bites, one after another; my chewing is quick and short. In the time it takes others to get through a third of their meal, mine is already gone. You can order my recipe airreminiscent of the sucker fish or Ruomba run amok.
Where my mouthwash goes, preventative advice follows. Online writers have announced slow like losing weight; Self-described “foodies” complain that there is “nothing worse” as opposed to watching a guest tuck into a carefully prepared meal. There are also children’s songs that warn the danger of eating too fast. My family and friends—many of whom have long since learned to avoid “sharing” space with me—often comment on my speed. “Slow down,” one of my aunts complained at a recent meal. “Don’t you know that eating too soon is bad?”
I do, or so I hear. Over the years, a the multitude about education to be found that people who eat fast eat more calories and gain more weight; they also suffer from high blood pressure and diabetes. “The data is very strong,” says Kathleen Melanson of the University of Rhode Island; evidence remains when researchers look at different regions, genders, and ages. These findings have also prompted researchers to fast-track their diet interventionand production equipment-the forks are shaking and wearable technology– that they hope to reduce their consumption.
But everywhere the mantra of go slowly it may not be as definitive or universal as it first appears. Fast eaters like me don’t necessarily suffer from metabolic disaster; Most of us probably safely and happily keep hoovering our food. Most studies investigating the speed of eating rely on the same population at one point in time, rather than randomized trials that follow people who are assigned to eat fast or slow; they can talk about the relationship between speed and other aspects of health, but not cause and effect. And not all of them really accept it on either long eating increases satiety or causes people to eat less. A researcher on this diet at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Spain, named Tany E. Garcidueñas-Fimbres, said that even experts “do not agree on the benefits of eating slowly. he studied eating trees.
The idea that eating too fast can lead to certain dangers is understandable. The secret, experts told me, is the potential difference between the amount of food we eat and the amount we see and process. Our brain does not write about being full until it receives several instructions from the stomach: chewing in the mouth, swallowing in the throat; diarrhoea, passing through the small intestine. The stomach is flooded with tons of food at once, and the symptoms can be difficult to keep in check – making it easy to swallow more food than the intestines need. Eating fast can also overload the blood with sugar, which can prevent a person from developing diabetes, says Michio Shimabukuro, a metabolic researcher at Fukushima Medical University, in Japan.
The big star here is that many theories are still largely speculative, says Janine Higgins, a pediatrics specialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. he learned to eat. Research that only shows a link between fast eating and overeating cannot determine what caused the other, if there is a link at all. Something else – stress, chronic illness, even diet – can cause all of this. “Good science is sorely lacking,” says Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University.
Scientists don’t even have a universal definition of what eating “slow” or “fast” is, or how to measure it. Years of research have used both meal timing, chewing speed, and other methods – but all have their drawbacks. Notes sometimes point to the cutoff of 20 minutes per meal, saying that it is time for the body to feel full. But Matthew Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that as a simplification: Satiety signals begin to enter the brain immediately when we eat, and satiety varies between people and situations. Studies that ask volunteers to demonstrate their speed and difficulties also: People often compare themselves to friends and relatives, who do not represent the whole population. The rate of consumption can also fluctuate throughout life or even a daydepending on hunger, stress, time constraints, the speed of the existing company, even the tempo of the background music.
In evolutionary terms, everything we humans eat stupidly. We eat “faster” than our relatives, more than an hour a day compared to about 12 of them, says Adam van Casteren, an environmentalist at the University of Manchester, England. We are thankful for the way we take care of our food: Fire, tools like knives, and more recently, chemical processing have softened the natural environment, freeing us from the “prison of mastication,” as van Casteren puts it. Modern Western cuisine has taken this behavior to an extreme. They are full of very-processed foodsthat soft and sugary and full of fat that he can be to swallow down and nary chew-which may be one of the factors that drives fast eating and metabolic problems.
In most cases, reduce they will come with benefits, not because it would reduce the risk of choking or excess gas. It can also upset blood sugar levels in people who eat heavy meals — which go through the stomach, Roberts told me, although the best move would be to eat less of those foods to begin with. And some studies only looked at people with a high BMI, plus Melanson on, have shown that eating slowly can help you lose weight. But, he warned, the results won’t work for everyone.
The main effect of happy food may not be about chewing or bite size, but helping people eat more. wisely. “Many of us get distracted when we eat,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Then we need our hunger and our fullness.” In countries like the United States, people also have to deal with a lot of pressure “to eat lunch early,” Herman Pontzer, a sociologist at Duke University, told me. A family that is fast food that we tend to reach for, and perhaps it is not surprising that people are not satisfied when they cut down on their food.
The point here is not to eat late; in the grand scheme of things, it seems like a healthy thing to do. At the same time, this does not mean that “eating slowly” should be a blanket command. For people who already eat a lot of high-fiber foods—which the body naturally produces ploddingly—Roberts doesn’t think lazy chewing has much to add. The praise for slow eating is, well, “a little bit of truth,” Hayes told me, which is easy to use.
I feel sorry for myself when I’m the first person on the table to finish a kilometer, and I don’t. have fun watching and commenting on “my greatest passion.” Some people who eat very slowly may be ridiculed for making others wait, but they are often not punished for harming their health. When I asked experts if it was harmful to eat slowly, most of them told me that they had never thought about it—and the answer was probably no.
However, for the most part, I’m happy to be the Usain Bolt of chewing gum. My hot foods are hot, and my cold foods are cold. I’ve been trying to eat more slowly for years, using some of my favorite methods: small bowls, small bites, crunchier food. I even, once, tried to read my chewing. The biggest difference I felt, however, wasn’t satiety or satisfaction; I just hated how mushy my food felt in my mouth.
Perhaps if I had been eating more slowly, I would have lost hope, stress, or weight – and, I think, happiness. There is something fast eating that can be old entertainmentlike running down an empty street a red sports car. If I only have an hour (or, knowing me, less) each day, I’d rather enjoy every bite.