The benefits of enjoying your meal

You may have heard of the benefits of the mediterranean diet, but some studies suggest it's not just the contents that are healthy. Here's how.

• Southern Europeans (think Italy, Greece and Spain) generally take more time over their meals and tend to ensure that they eat in pleasant surroundings, at an attractively laid table free of clutter — TV dinners are not part of the agenda.
• They savour their food, lingering, chatting, making meals into social occasions. This style of dining is beneficial to health in all kinds of ways: Being social is good for your heart, and it may also hold a clue to losing weight.

• Habitually hurrying your meals doubles your risk of being overweight, according to one study of 3,000 people. Why? Eating fast could mean that there's not enough time for your stomach to send "I'm full" signals to your brain to tell you to stop eating before you consume too much. And the simple act of chewing may send other signals that cause your brain to feel satisfied and release appetite-suppressing hormones — but only 20 minutes or more after you start to eat.
• Those in the study who both ate fast and continued eating until they felt full were three times as likely to be overweight as those who did neither of these things. So if you wolf down too much too quickly, your body's natural feedback mechanisms are unable to keep up. It appears that some "fast food" may be dangerous because of the speed at which it's generally eaten, as well as because of its contents.

• Deliberately trying to savour your food could have other benefits. Several studies suggest that obese people actually derive less pleasure from food than people of normal weight — and that they eat more in an attempt to increase their sense of satisfaction.
• In reinforcement of this theory, researchers have now shown that some people have a particular genetic makeup that adversely affects the quantity of gratification-promoting chemicals in their brain.
• So eat slowly, take time to relish your food, put your knife and fork down at intervals.
• Never eat lunch at your desk, while talking on the phone or answering emails. If you do, you are more likely to overeat.