A leisurely four-course dinner at a fine restaurant can take two hours to eat, while meals eaten at home are usually over in 30 minutes. Does one leave you more satisfied — and less likely to snack afterward — than the other?
Researchers in the Netherlands set out to see whether, all other things being equal — meaning people ate the exact same quantities of the exact same food — the speed of consumption had an effect on diners’ feelings of satiety and hunger and on the chemical signals, or hormones, that are involved in appetite regulation. The researchers also wanted to see how the pace of the meal affected postprandial snacking.
Though people said they felt more sated and less hungry after a staggered meal that lasted two hours with breaks between courses and didn’t really want to eat more afterward, the experience didn’t change their snacking behavior, said Sofie G. Lemmens, a postdoctoral fellow at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who was the lead author of the paper, published in the March issue of The Journal of Nutrition.
Two and a half hours after the beginning of the meal, when the diners were offered an array of traditional Dutch tea treats like apple cake, chocolate-covered marshmallows, peanuts, chips and waffles, they ate almost as much as they did two and a half hours after a meal that they had consumed in 30 minutes.
“We didn’t see a big difference in their energy intake afterward,” Dr. Lemmens said. In fact, the slow diners ate only 10 percent fewer snack calories than when they had consumed their meal quickly, a difference that wasn’t statistically significant.
About two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and so far, public health efforts to curb or reverse the trend have not had major results. Overeating and physical inactivity are the primary causes of obesity, but Americans also eat a large number of meals outside the home — at least one a day, according to some estimates — and public health experts have been examining the roles played by restaurant meals and fast food in the obesity epidemic.
For their study, the Dutch researchers recruited 38 young men and women and asked them to eat the same meal in a controlled test kitchen on two separate days, once as a “nonstaggered” meal consumed in 30 minutes and once as a “staggered” meal, with 20- to 25-minute breaks between courses.
Dr. Lemmens said the meal was a typical Dutch dinner consisting of a salad, a macaroni dish with meat sauce followed by vegetable lasagna and raspberry pudding for dessert (14 percent protein, 54 percent carbohydrate and 32 percent fat). Blood samples were drawn before, during and after the meal to measure levels of hormones involved in appetite signaling, and participants also reported how sated or hungry they felt at points throughout the meal.
When participants ate the drawn-out meal, their satiety hormones (glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, and peptide tyrosine-tyrosine, or PYY, believed to communicate satiety to the brain and curb the appetite) increased more gradually than after the nonstaggered meal, when they spiked more rapidly. Just before the snacking period, diners who had eaten a drawn-out meal rated their satiety higher and their hunger lower, and their levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases with hunger and is believed to stimulate appetite, were lower.
Yet these differences in hormone levels did not significantly affect how much participants ate of the sweet and salty tea snacks, Dr. Lemmens said, suggesting the availability of tempting foods overrides the body’s internal messages about when to stop eating.
“The food environment is overriding all the biological cues,” said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, who blames what he calls a “toxic food environment” for the prevalence of obesity. he added, “Whatever biological safeguards there are against weight gain are being disabled, almost like someone went in and changed all the wiring.”
