The Effects of Mindful Eating Education on Increasing Satiety Signals

Background: Mindful eating is a practice that incorporates focusing on thoughts, emotions and sensations within the body when consuming food. Satiety is defined as a state of fullness where there is no longer an intake of food. Mindful eating techniques could help college students identify their hunger and satiety signals and respond to those cues over environmental or psychosocial cues that could lead to over-eating. Giving mindful eating education has the possibility to help people recognize their satiety signals and stop eating sooner. Objective: To examine the effects of mindful eating education on increasing satiety signals. Design: Randomized cross-over study Participants: The study consisted of 25 participants (Ages 18-30, 19 females, 6 males). Main outcomes: Satiety and meal completion time pre- (Visit 1) and post- (Visit 2) mindful eating education and increased awareness of satiety signals. Secondary outcomes: Frequencies of pre-mindful eating education responses within sample populations, follow-up survey responses within sample populations, and characteristics within sample populations Statistics: Normality of quantitative variables was assessed using Shapiro-Wilk test and box plots, pre- and post-variables in both groups was compared using Wilcoxon signed – rank test. The association between the categorical variables were examined by the chi-square test and Fisher Exact test. Results: No significant difference was found comparing satiety time during visit 1 and visit 2 (P-value = 0.459). Similarly, no significant difference was found when comparing the meal completion time during visit 1 and visit 2 (P-value = 0.737). However, there was a significant difference when satiety time was deducted from meal completion time and compared between visit 1 and visit 2 (P-value = 0.008). Conclusion: Mindful eating can potentially be used as an intervention to increase recognition of satiety signals. Further research within this topic is warranted with a larger sample size and duration to observe other possible significant outcomes, and to better standardize the mindful eating education given