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There's an obvious alternative explanation here: Overweight people are generally hungrier than average. Hungrier people also tend to eat faster. Eating speed do

There's an obvious alternative explanation here: Overweight people are generally hungrier than average. Hungrier people also tend to eat faster. Eating speed does not cause obesity, but correlates with it because it proxies a general propensity toward hunger. Still, I suspect the article's conclusion is at least partially right, even if it's a bit sensationalized, but the present evidence is fully consistent with a non-causal relationship as well.

gaius 16y ago
Have you ever eaten a meal, and afterwards felt uncomfortably full? Or have you ever been interrupted halfway through a meal and when you came back, you didn't want to finish it? It takes about 20 minutes for satiety to kick in - the feeling that is the opposite of hunger. The stomach takes this long to communicate with the brain. If you eat quickly, you spend longer in the window of time between when you have eaten enough and when the sensation of hunger diminishes. That's the key.
- goodside 16y ago
  Right, that's why I say I think they're at least partially right. However, I can come up with a few other theories for why the opposite could be true as well. Just off the top of my head: Whether the food you consume is burned immediately or stored as fat is regulated significantly by taste sensations, as evidenced by studies where people were forced to eat diets consistent of bland-tasting (but otherwise not especially healthy) food, and lost significant weight. Also, people who eat ad libitum will gain more weight than people who consume identical amounts of food through a gastro-nasal feeding tube. Studies on livestock have shown you can promote weight-gain by adding water to dry chow, which makes it taste better but obviously does not alter its nutritional content, even though the animals are fed the exact same quantity of chow. So, it's reasonable to at least suspect that doing something that increases the taste sensation of food, such as instructing people to chew longer before swallowing, might cause weight to increase. I don't know which of these is true with certainty. The evidence is still somewhat ambiguous.
- jerf 16y ago
  Yes, but when I stuff myself on one meal, accidentally or otherwise, my next meal is smaller or sometimes even nonexistent. That won't a priori lead to obesity. This does nothing to address the real question, does overeating cause obesity or does obesity cause overeating? I'd be much happier if the dietary research community would stop designing experiments that are intrinsically blind to that question and start actually examining it. ("Good Calories, Bad Calories" has already been brought up, but I would point out that if there is anything to take away from that book, it is not that he has proved the point that obesity causes overeating, rather than the other way around. The point he really proves is that it is a reasonable hypothesis that fits the facts, including the experiments that have been done, and it has not been adequately tested. It has been unscientifically discarded-by-axiom. If it is put to the test and fails, so be it. But this appears to be yet another experiment that fails to distinguish between the two cases at all, and therefore is not all that interesting to me. This, BTW, is not news to Taubes, it is all he really claims, too.)
  - euccastro 16y ago
    If the mechanism that stores glucose into fat is triggered by glucose peaks, as some people claim ("graze don't gorge"), then stuffing yourself in one meal and skipping the next may lead to more fat accumulated for the same calorie intake.
fgf 16y ago
I eat calorie dense (but low carb) food quickly. I got really low body fat eating this way. I think this, at most, is a key.
- rsheridan6 16y ago
  Sure. I think it probably works due to my own experience, but slowly sipping milkshakes all day is not going to make you slender. Obesity has multiple causes.
- sedachv 16y ago
  I strongly suspect the key connection here is insulin response. Eating slowly is probably akin to eating foods that do not cause spikes in insulin levels. What leads me to believe this is that there has been a study (sorry, don't have the link) that changing the order in which you eat certain foods as part of one meal has a similar insulin dampening effect.

gaius 16y ago

Have you ever eaten a meal, and afterwards felt uncomfortably full? Or have you ever been interrupted halfway through a meal and when you came back, you didn't want to finish it? It takes about 20 minutes for satiety to kick in - the feeling that is the opposite of hunger. The stomach takes this long to communicate with the brain. If you eat quickly, you spend longer in the window of time between when you have eaten enough and when the sensation of hunger diminishes. That's the key.

goodside 16y ago
Right, that's why I say I think they're at least partially right. However, I can come up with a few other theories for why the opposite could be true as well. Just off the top of my head: Whether the food you consume is burned immediately or stored as fat is regulated significantly by taste sensations, as evidenced by studies where people were forced to eat diets consistent of bland-tasting (but otherwise not especially healthy) food, and lost significant weight. Also, people who eat ad libitum will gain more weight than people who consume identical amounts of food through a gastro-nasal feeding tube. Studies on livestock have shown you can promote weight-gain by adding water to dry chow, which makes it taste better but obviously does not alter its nutritional content, even though the animals are fed the exact same quantity of chow. So, it's reasonable to at least suspect that doing something that increases the taste sensation of food, such as instructing people to chew longer before swallowing, might cause weight to increase. I don't know which of these is true with certainty. The evidence is still somewhat ambiguous.
jerf 16y ago
Yes, but when I stuff myself on one meal, accidentally or otherwise, my next meal is smaller or sometimes even nonexistent. That won't a priori lead to obesity. This does nothing to address the real question, does overeating cause obesity or does obesity cause overeating? I'd be much happier if the dietary research community would stop designing experiments that are intrinsically blind to that question and start actually examining it. ("Good Calories, Bad Calories" has already been brought up, but I would point out that if there is anything to take away from that book, it is not that he has proved the point that obesity causes overeating, rather than the other way around. The point he really proves is that it is a reasonable hypothesis that fits the facts, including the experiments that have been done, and it has not been adequately tested. It has been unscientifically discarded-by-axiom. If it is put to the test and fails, so be it. But this appears to be yet another experiment that fails to distinguish between the two cases at all, and therefore is not all that interesting to me. This, BTW, is not news to Taubes, it is all he really claims, too.)
- euccastro 16y ago
  If the mechanism that stores glucose into fat is triggered by glucose peaks, as some people claim ("graze don't gorge"), then stuffing yourself in one meal and skipping the next may lead to more fat accumulated for the same calorie intake.

fgf 16y ago

I eat calorie dense (but low carb) food quickly. I got really low body fat eating this way. I think this, at most, is a key.

rsheridan6 16y ago
Sure. I think it probably works due to my own experience, but slowly sipping milkshakes all day is not going to make you slender. Obesity has multiple causes.
sedachv 16y ago
I strongly suspect the key connection here is insulin response. Eating slowly is probably akin to eating foods that do not cause spikes in insulin levels. What leads me to believe this is that there has been a study (sorry, don't have the link) that changing the order in which you eat certain foods as part of one meal has a similar insulin dampening effect.