YOUR mother was right when she told you not to wolf down your food, research suggests.

People who eat more slowly feel fuller and think they have eaten more than those who eat quickly, tests showed.

Previous studies have found that slower eaters have lower BMIs – body mass index – than those who gobble down their grub.

But the reason why eating slowly is linked to being thinner has, so far, been poorly understood.

To investigate whether how quickly we eat influences how hungry we feel afterwards, researchers from the University of Bristol, United Kingdom (U.K.) fed volunteers Sainsbury’s tomato soup through a tube into their mouths.

This set-up prevented the researchers from judging visually how much soup had been eaten.

The participants then had 400ml of soup pumped into their mouths at two rates. One was at a fast rate of 11.8ml for two seconds, followed by a four second pause.

The other, the slow rate, was 5.4ml of soup for one second followed by a ten-second pause.

The 40 volunteers, who were paid £15, were then asked how full they felt at the end of the meal and two hours after.

Those who took the soup more slowly said they felt fuller than the fast eaters both immediately after the test and two hours later.

The slow eaters also overestimated how much they had eaten – guessing that on average they had eaten 108ml more soup than the other group.

The scientists believe that further research is now needed into whether eating more slowly leads to us snacking less.

They speculate that thinking we are full may keep the weight off because it makes us less likely to start eating – but once we start we eat just as much as when we feel hungry.

In the experiment, both the slow and the fast eaters were asked to taste two different kinds of biscuits – custard creams and chocolate chip cookies – in what was purported to be a ‘taste test’. Both groups ate roughly the same number of biscuits.

The researchers believe that a further experiment, where volunteers are not ‘forced’ to eat biscuits but allowed to eat without being prompted, could result in less snacking.

Previous research into ‘satiety’, as scientists call feeling fuller, has shown that how we feel is just one aspect in the complex picture of appetite.

Environmental prompts, such as the smell of a juicy steak. can throw us off course by stimulating our appetite and leading us to eat even when we don’t feel hungry.

Ann McDonald, a researcher at Harvard University, United States (U.S.) who was unconnected with the new study, said as well as our own perception of hunger, hormones in the stomach have a role to play in our feelings of fullness.

*Culled from DailyMail online