04/02/2025
Eating Slowly to Manage Weight
Can savoring our food help us manage body weight better?
Matthew Kadey, MS, RD
(Dwayne here) I challenge my clients when eating with friends to casually look around the table, specifically how friends are eating. How quickly do they take the next bite? Did they finish chewing the last? Do they play with their food? Do they have the next bite ready before they've swallowed the last. How often do they take a drink of liquid while eating. This little experiment is eye-opening.
How fast do you eat?
Chew on this: Backed by some intriguing science, eating slowly and chewing thoroughly could be recommended as eating strategies towards helping with weight management efforts.
In a clever investigation published in Scientific Reports, researchers from Japan conducted three trials where volunteers (1) swallowed a liquid food normally, (2) kept test food in their mouth for 30 seconds without chewing, thereby allowing prolonged tasting before swallowing, and (3) added 30 seconds of chewing at a frequency of once per second while also tasting.
While there was no difference in hunger and fullness scores among the trials, diet-induced thermogenesis (the energy expenditure of digesting and processing food) increased to a greater extent when tasting and chewing were involved in the feeding process. This result suggests that oral stimuli can have a noticeable impact on energy expenditure, and we should be eating slowly instead of being quick to wolf down our meals.
While the difference in energy expenditure per meal is relatively small, the cumulative effect gathered during multiple meals and snacks, taken over numerous days, could have an impact on body weight.
