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When your mom said to slow down and chew your food, she may have been more right than she knew: Speedy eating can double your risk of being overweight, according to a new study. Japanese scientists compared hundreds of food-savoring people to their sprinter counterparts, and found a striking correlation with weight, the BBC reports.

Filling your stomach quickly could interfere with the body's feedback system that tells you when you're full, a scientist suggests, simply by not letting the signals catch up to consumption. While wolfing down meals may once have had an evolutionary advantage—back in the hunter-gatherer times—today children should be taught to take more leisurely mealtimes.
(Read more eating stories.)