Eating Slowly Could Help Weight Loss

We’ve all had moments when we’ve been so ravenously hungry that we gobble a meal or snack without even tasting it. Experts in the U.K. are using some pretty high tech gear (two climate controlled, whole body calorimeters, for starters) in a lab dubbed the “flab lab” to study weight… most recently looking at eating speed and if eating slowly might contribute to losing weight.

Scientists are hoping the state of the art unit will help them to explore how food, exercise, medication and sleep all impact weight.

While they agree it’s all well and good to advise people to eat less or exercise more, that message obviously isn’t getting through. Science needs to know more about what’s going on in order to help people.

We do know that almost a third of U.S. adults and about 17% of children and teens are considered obese. Over the last two decades there’s been a dramatic increase in the numbers of obese in this country. Obesity is now on the rise throughout the rest of the world, even in low and middle-income nations, and has long been linked with some of the most serious health problems.

The two linked units the researchers use in the “flab lab” allow monitoring of movement, breathing, what subjects eat and excrete. They come complete with a fold down bed, a toilet and sink, and a desk with a computer.

Volunteers can work, surf the net or watch TV programs or movies during their stay. Hatches have been built into the door and walls so food can be delivered, blood tests can be run, and equipment can be hooked up without impacting the atmospheric bubble in the unit.

One of the first experiments the researchers ran involved the eating speed, how it might change hunger levels and the rate the energy is burned off.

Participants in the study will spend three days in one of the whole body calorimeters in the lab… an air locked compartment that can make some very precise calculations about how much energy is burned.

On the first day of the experiment, participants ate lunch in ten minutes, for the second day they’re instructed to make lunch last 20 minutes, then on the last day they’re allowed 40 minutes to eat their mid-day meal. Researchers control the speed of consumption by dividing foods into individual portions and delivering them to the subjects 5-minutes apart.

At the close of each day, appetite levels are monitored by participants being offered a wide selection of food and told to eat whatever they want. Study participants report the time in the sealed unit is confining but not boring. Eating more slowly seemed to increase one’s appreciation for taste, but the final results of the experiment won’t be available for several months yet.

Other research out of Japan has suggested that eating slowly might just limited the appetite and reduce the risk of diabetes. The folks at the flab lab want to see if they can duplicate these findings under more carefully controlled conditions. Gaining even a small measure of understanding about obesity could prove useful as more and more adults (and children) are becoming obese.

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