Chew More To Eat Less at Thanksgiving Dinner

The average Thanksgiving food extravaganza comes with a hefty caloric price tag: 4,500 calories and 229 grams of fat, according to the Calorie Control Council.

With turkey, trimmings, sides, pie and alcohol, a Thanksgiving meal typically comes in at 3,000 calories, while pre-dinner snacking accounts for the remaining 1,500, Forbes reported.

The already huge calorie count doesn't factor in breakfast or "that night-time leftover turkey sandwich supper," the magazine noted.

But people who want to have their Thanksgiving dinner and eat it, too, should take a look at a new study from the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Researchers found that people who chew their food longer eat less overall, saving on calories.

In the study, subjects ate five Totino's pizza rolls and documented how many times they chewed each portion. Then a group of 47 participants, comprising normal weight, overweight and obese subjects, came to three weekly lunches.

At each lunch, participants received 60 pizza rolls and were told to eat as many as needed until they felt full. Subjects were asked at one lunch to chew the same number of times they did at the first testing session. At another lunch, they were told to chew 50 percent more, and at a third, they were asked to chew twice as many times more.

When participants increased their chewing by 50 percent, they ate 10 percent less food and took in 70 fewer calories, according to the study. The lunch where subjects chewed twice as many times more showed an even greater difference: Participants ate 15 percent less food and 112 fewer calories.

Chewing more likely results in fewer calories because the meal lasts longer, sending signals of fullness to the brain; because it takes around 20 minutes for the brain to recognize fullness, inhaling food doesn't give the body enough time to send messages of satiety.