Guzzling down food is bad for your health

With all the festive cheer on our menus, we need to ensure we don’t gulp down our Christmas dinner. Are you a fast eater? This is an important question because the faster you eat the more likely you are to fall into the trap of “metabolic syndrome”.

This is a fancy way of saying high cholesterol, plus high blood pressure, plus high blood sugar, plus high insulin levels. That equates to type 2 diabetes.

Yes, all of that because of wolfing your food. I’ve known for years that it takes about 27 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain it is full.

Knowing this you can see how easy it is to consume thousands of calories before your stomach gets the message to your head. Fast eating fuels overeating. And that’s exactly what the latest research demonstrates.

A study of more than 1,000 middleaged people found those who ate quickly were five-and-a-half times more likely than slow eaters to go on to develop metabolic syndrome.

Dr Takayuki Yamaji, a cardiologist at Hiroshima University in Japan, said: “Eating more slowly may be a crucial lifestyle change to help prevent metabolic syndrome.”

Researchers found 11.6% of the quick eaters got metabolic syndrome, or “mets”, compared to 6.5% of people who ate at a normal speed and 2.3% of slow eaters. During the five-year follow-up 84 people developed mets.

Dr Yamaji’s team evaluated 642 men and 441 women who were asked to describe their usual eating speed as slow, normal or fast and divided them into three groups. Information on lifestyle factors such as dietary behaviours and physical activity, as well as medical history, were obtained by filling in a questionnaire at the outset.

Besides just eating more slowly what else can you do to protect yourself from mets? Well, a previous study from North Carolina University might help. It found “mindful eating” – savouring every mouthful, focusing on flavour and “eating with purpose” – helped people lose six times as much weight as other slimmers.

As long as they avoided distractions while eating, like turning off the TV at dinner time and not eating lunch at their desk, they found overweight people who adopted “mindful eating” lost four and a half pounds in 15 weeks, compared to other slimmers who lost just two thirds of a pound.

Plus, six months after the trial stopped, three quarters of participants in the mindfulness programme had kept their weight off or lost even more.

Another study has found that eating slowly and having smaller bites makes us feel less hungry an hour afterwards than if we wolf down food.