Modeling and Interpreting Cumulative Intake Curves in Individuals With Obesity

A google search on “Mindful Eating” and “chew your food slowly” yields over 3,000,000 hits. Likewise, books and medical sites advocating the concept of mindful eating have contributed to the common belief that eating slowly and mindfully will make you feel full without eating as much and thereby control your body weight. Could they be wrong? We seek the truth, much as a century of psychologists trying to understand eating rates, satiety (feeling of fullness), and total food consumption by studying the shape of an individual’s food consumption curve or cumulative eating curve. For the first time, we apply the mathematics behind rates of change - calculus - to demonstrate that the rate of eating is intricately intertwined with a point of satiety and an eating plateau. From this analysis we show that the simple statement of "eat slowly and eat less" is too simple. The rate of food consumption is related to other components of eating; slowing down may not necessarily lead to eating less.