New findings from the RESTRUCTURE project demonstrate that meal texture can be manipulated to both slow eating speed and reduce intake across a wide range of different meal formats. The new findings have been published in the British Journal of Nutrition in a study entitled “Consistent effect of eating rate on food and energy intake across 24-ad libitum meals”.

The research team sought to determine how consistently texture-based differences in eating rate can influence intake across a wide variety of meals, and profiled 24 different meals (12 breakfast and 12 dinner meals), as part of the preparations for the larger RESTRUCTURE RCT. The research team measured both eating rate and amount consumed and showed that participants consistently lower intakes for the meals that were consumed slower, compared to those with textures that promoted a faster eating speed. Findings were consistent across the meals such that on average a decrease of 20% in eating rate led to an 11% decrease in food intake. The authors conclude that “our findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that reducing eating rates using food texture can have a consistent effect on food and energy intake across a wide variety of hedonically equivalent meals.”

Findings from the current study have been used to help inform the design of test diets for the larger RESTRUCTURE feeding trial which is currently underway, and which aims to test the impact of eating rate on energy intake from ultra-processed diets.

Full study: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007114524001478