Eating slowly is overrated – The Atlantic

While I’m feeding myself, for the record, I’ve been feeding myself for decades now. fast. I bite back and forth. My chewing is hasty and less. Mine is already gone while others finish a third of their meal. It’s also my approach to food. air pressurereminiscent of suction-fed fish and runaway rumba.

My vacuuming mouth is followed by advice to curb it.internet writer declared slow as thinself-proclaimed “gourmet” “Nothing worse than this” Than watching your guests inhale your painstakingly prepared meals. There is even a nursery rhyme that warns. dangers of eating too fast. My family and friends, who learned long ago to avoid “dividing” entrees with me, often comment on my speed. “Take it easy,” one of my aunts got annoyed at her recent meal. “Don’t you know that eating fast is bad for your health?”

I think so, or at least I’ve heard. for decades, a crowd of of the study offal found Fast eaters are more likely to burn more calories and carry more weight. They are also more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes. “The data is very robust,” says Kathleen Melanson of the University of Rhode Island. The evidence holds even when researchers look across geography, gender and age. This finding even led researchers to investigate eating speed. interventiondevice design—vibrating fork and wearable technology—they want to slow down their eating.

However, a widely spread mantra is go more slowly It’s probably not as definitive or universal as it first seems. Fast eaters like me aren’t necessarily doomed to metabolic misfortune. Many of us can probably safely and happily continue eating. Most studies investigating eating speed are based on population-level observations made at a single time point, rather than extended clinical trials that follow people assigned to eat fast or slow. They can talk about how pace relates to certain aspects of health, but not about cause and effect.and actually not all of them consent upon somehow linger Eating makes you feel more satisfied or eats less. “There is no consensus on the benefits of slow eating,” says Tany E. Garcidueñas Fimbres, a nutrition researcher at the University of Rovira y Virgili in Spain. Studied meal rate.

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The idea that fast eating can pose certain health risks certainly makes sense. The key, experts say, is a potential mismatch between how quickly we take in nutrients and how quickly we perceive and process them. Our brain doesn’t feel full until it receives a series of cues from the digestive tract. That is, chewing it in your mouth or swallowing it down your throat. The stomach expands and is sent to the small intestine. Sending a large amount of food into the gastrointestinal tract at once can cause the signal to struggle to keep up, making it easier to swallow more food than the gut requires. Eating too fast puts too much sugar in the blood and can lead to insulin resistance, a common precursor to diabetes, says Michio Shimabukuro, a metabolism researcher at Fukushima Medical University.

The large asterisk here means that many of these ideas are still theoretical, says Janine Higgins, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. studied eating pace. Studies that merely demonstrate an association between fast eating and increased food intake cannot prove which observation led to the other, even if there is a causal relationship. Other factors, such as stress, underlying medical conditions, and even diet, can cause both. “There’s just a lack of good science,” says Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University.

Scientists don’t even have a universal definition of what a “slow” or “fast” meal is, or how to measure it. Studies over the years have used total meal time, chewing speed, and other indicators, but all have drawbacks. article sometimes point up to the cutoff of 20 minutes per serving, claims that it is the time it takes for the body to feel full. But Matthew Hayes, a nutritional neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized that as an oversimplification. Satisfaction signals start flowing into the brain as soon as we eat, and satiety thresholds vary from person to person and from situation to situation.A survey asking volunteers to rate their speed There’s a problem Also, people often compare themselves to friends and family who are not representative of the population as a whole. The amount of food eaten may fluctuate over a lifetime or even over the course of a person’s life. Dayhunger, stress, time constraints, current company pace, and even BGM tempo.

In an evolutionary sense, all We humans eat abnormally fast. We eat “orders of magnitude faster” than our primate relatives. almost 12 of themsays Adam Van Castellen, a feeding ecologist at the University of Manchester, UK. That’s largely thanks to the way we treat our food. Fire, tools such as knives and, more recently, chemical treatments have softened natural raw materials and freed us from, as Van Castellen puts it, “the prison of chewing.” The modern Western diet takes that pattern to the extreme.tightly packed Ultra-processed foodso Soft, high in sugar and fat they can be I swallowed it Can be eaten without chewing – this may be one of the reasons for eating too quickly and chronic metabolic disease.

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slows down in many situations Comes with perksEspecially since it reduces the risk of suffocation and excess gas. It may also moderate blood sugar spikes in people whose diets are high in processed foods that pass through the digestive tract, Roberts said. However, a healthier way would probably be to eat less of those foods in the first place. There are also some studies that focus on people with high BMI. Melancon’s, has been shown to help with weight loss when eaten slowly. But she warned that these results don’t necessarily apply to everyone.

The main impact of eating slowly is likely to be helping people eat more, rather than chewing speed or bite size per se. carefully. “Many of us get distracted while eating,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “So we miss the signals that we’re hungry or full.” University anthropologist Herman Ponzer said. Given that we tend to dabble in fast food, it may come as no surprise that people don’t feel satisfied when they cut back on their meals.

The point here is not to make slow eating a bad thing. Overall, it seems like a pretty healthy thing to do.At the same time, that doesn’t mean that “eating slowly” should be inclusive. instructions. For people who are already eating lots of high-fiber foods, which the body naturally processes slowly, Roberts thinks slow chewing doesn’t make much sense. The praise of slow eating is at best “half-truth,” Hayes said, making it vulnerable to abuse.

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I get self-conscious when I cross the table first by a mile, but that’s not the case. fun Gazes and comments about my “great appetite”. Certain extremely slow eaters may be teased for keeping others waiting, but they are not usually blamed for compromising their health. When I asked the experts if slow eating was harmful, some said they had never thought about it and the answer was probably no.

Still, for the most part, I’m content to be the Usain Bolt of biting. Hot food stays hot and cold food stays cold. Intermittently over the years I’ve had smaller utensils, smaller sips, crunchy food. I even tried to count the bites once. But the biggest difference I felt wasn’t the increased feeling of fullness or satisfaction. I didn’t like the sticky food left in my mouth.

Perhaps if I had stuck to slow eating, I might have lost some of the gas, the risk of choking, and some of the weight, but at the same time, I think I had a little less joy.There is something in fast eating that has been around since ancient times. funsimilar to rushing down an empty highway red sports car. If I had an hour or so (or less, I know) to eat each day, I’d want to savor every lively, vulgar bite.