When you sit down at the dinner table, do you wolf down your meal with three bites and a burp, or pick your way through with tiny nibbles?
We all instinctively know how quickly we eat. But what you may not have realised is that your chewing has real consequences – for your digestion, waistline and overall health.
“There is so much evidence that if you just slow down how fast you eat your food, you reduce energy intake without even realising,” says Prof Sarah Berry, nutrition scientist at King’s College London.
Indeed, studies have shown that when we slow down our eating by a fifth, we eat between 11 and 15 per cent fewer calories.
On the flipside, people who eat quickly appear to be at higher risk of obesity, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, compared to slower eaters.
Simply slowing down at mealtimes could help you eat less, lose weight and support better digestion, all without feeling hungry.
“Tonight, if there’s just one thing you change when you’re having your meal,” says Berry, “slow it down.”
Why slow eating works
Unlike counting calories or cutting carbs, eating slowly is a weight-loss hack that won’t leave you wanting more.
The reason is simple: it’s your chewing, not just what happens later in the gut, that sets satiety in motion. As you chew, your stomach begins to stretch, and your gut starts releasing fullness hormones – chemical signals that tell your brain you’ve had enough.
But these systems aren’t instant.
“All those natural processes need time to develop,” Prof Ciarán Forde, nutrition scientist at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, whose research focuses on how the senses affect eating behaviour. “There’s a small lag between eating and the change in chemical signals to the brain.”
This lag creates a mismatch between how much you’ve eaten and how full you feel. If you eat quickly, intake can easily outpace the body’s satiety controls.
“They might arrive long after the event, when you’ve finished your eighteenth cookie, and you’re suddenly ready to burst,” explains Forde. “It’s too late by then.”
You can’t speed up these biological signals – but you can give them time to arrive. Slow your eating, and you allow the body’s natural fullness signals to do their job.
One of the key players here is the hormone GLP-1 – the same chemical mimicked by weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy – which tells the brain we’re full.
Indeed, research led by Waseda University, Japan, found that chewing shredded cabbage released more GLP-1 than when participants gulped it down in pureed form.
You feel full, so you eat less, without even trying. But it’s not just your appetite that changes.
In a 2021 study, Forde’s team found that slower eaters not only felt fuller, but they had increased insulin responses to their meals, meaning their bodies were better able to process dietary sugar.
“The first phase of digestion occurs behind your lips, not down in your stomach,” says Forde. “You’re priming the body to receive nutrients, so how you chew influences post-meal metabolism and feelings of fullness too.”
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How to eat more slowly
Eating more slowly, then, helps us feel full and improves how the body metabolises food. But changing such a fundamental habit is easier said than done.
For Berry, slowing down starts with paying attention. “We’re eating too fast because we’re distracted, in front of the TV,” she says. “We’re not eating in a family setting where you put your knife and fork down to have a conversation.”
So, if you can, switch off screens and sit down with your family to eat. Focusing on a good conversation – as well as what’s on your plate – may create natural gaps in your chewing.
And, Berry adds, just putting your cutlery down in between mouthfuls can help you pace yourself.
Other research has found that eating with chopsticks encourages us to take smaller bites, chew food more thoroughly and eat slowly.
Switch up your food
Screens off, surrounded by family, chopsticks in hand – all this may help, or you may masticate as manically as ever.
Not to worry. There’s a secret second option which can slow you down without any effort: choosing chewier foods.
Just switching what you eat, from soft to crunchy, can drag out dinner and substantially reduce your appetite.
That was the main finding from Forde’s Restructure research project, in which 41 healthy adults tried two different diets, each over a two-week period.
Participants were allowed to eat as much or as little as they liked, and the diets were matched for nutrition and palatability. The only difference? Texture.
“I developed textures in those diets, so that one diet was eaten relatively slowly, and one diet was eaten relatively quickly, based purely on sensory properties,” explains Forde.
“What we found was really striking: with no instructions whatsoever to participants – just by giving them everyday foods from the supermarket – people ate, on average, 370 fewer calories per day when they slowed down their intake [with more textured food].”
Cumulatively, when participants ate softer foods, they ate around 5,200 extra calories over the course of two weeks. Whereas on the slow-eating diet, adults lost on average close to half a kilogram (1lb) of body fat each.
“These are huge effects, and we achieved them by telling people nothing,” says Forde. “No labels, no public health warnings – just purely the food you put in your mouth. That’s what drove the effect.”
In short: opt for a crusty roll rather than a soft bun, crunchy roasted broccoli rather than steamed, grilled chicken breast rather than chicken nuggets.
And, Forde adds, watch out for sugary drinks – which require no chewing whatsoever per calorie – as well as energy-rich, softly textured food.
“Excessive amounts of oil and sauce can help you consume dishes more rapidly,” he explains. “And fatty, sweet, creamy foods can be eaten very quickly. You can be on your third marshmallow tea cake before you even notice it.”
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