Chewing more will lead to less calories
Chewing your food more can lead to eating fewer calories, a new study suggests.
Chewing their food 40 times instead of the typical 15 times caused the participants to eat nearly 12 per cent fewer calories.
We are aware that it takes the brain 20 minutes to register that is full, so chewing for longer will certainly help with this process.
Jie Li and colleagues from Harbin Medical University in China gave a typical breakfast to 14 obese young men and 16 young men of normal weight to see if there were differences in how they chewed their food. The researchers also looked to see whether chewing more would lead subjects to eat less and would affect levels of blood sugar or certain hormones that regulate appetite.
The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found a connection between the amount of chewing and levels of several hormones that tell the brain when to begin to eat and stop.
More chewing was assciated with lower blood levels of ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates appetite, as well as higher levels of CCK, a hormone believed to reduce appetite.
Femalefirst Taryn Davies