Remember when your mother cautioned you to chew your food well before swallowing it? Nutritionists tell us the importance of letting saliva start the digestive process in the mouth. And, as an adult, the mindfulness meditation experts tell us to be in the moment and experience everything, including food, as fully as possible. Now research now reports that people who eat their food quickly have double the risk of developing pre diabetes with what is called “impaired glucose tolerance.”
Even people who snack and eat food late at night do not have the same increased risk of pre diabetes that the fast eaters do.
Impaired glucose tolerance is evidence that the body is beginning to struggle with responding normally to the signals that insulin gives to cells to take up glucose (the body’s fuel) from the bloodstream. As a result, the blood sugar creeps up too high. When it crosses a threshold, the person ends with the diagnosis of diabetes (type 2).
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There are many other risk factors for diabetes, including being overweight or obese. Eating slowly is not necessarily a cause of the problem – it could just be a correlation. That is, the kind of person who eats fast may have other problems internally that are the real reasons behind the impaired glucose tolerance. Still, if nothing else, people who eat fast may be stressed — and stress hormones like cortisol definitely impair glucose tolerance and foster the development of diabetes.
It seems worth a try to slow down and enjoy your food, bite by bite. It might help you in ways you hadn’t even considered.
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