In standard Dutch you must eat you vegetables but certainly not your vowels! A phrase like Komen eten has 4 full-blown syllables that are each approximately equal in duration. That means that the more syllables you get, the more time the phrase will take to pronounce eg

Eten.

Komen eten.

Je mag komen eten.

A language like that is called syllable-timed.

English however is fundamentally different in that respect and is stress-timed.  It means that stressed syllables tend to occur at regular intervals of time, regardless of the number of intervening unstressed syllables.

HORSES EAT GRASS.
The HORSES EAT GRASS.
The HORSES EAT the GRASS.
The HORSES will EAT the GRASS.
The HORSES will have EATen the GRASS.
The HORSES might have been EATing the GRASS.

All of the above would take approximately the same time to pronounce - unstressed syllables shorten to fit this rhythm, or even drop out eg the word eaten would typically be pronounced with a so-called syllabic /n/ at the end: it fills a syllable without needing a vowel. And if you use the syllabic /n/, you'll need to use the unreleased /t/ meaning that your tongue and everything is in place to pronounce a /t/, but you don't release the air. The vowel that is dropped is called a SCHWA (doffe /e/ like in het).

BTW - any idea why all other phonemes are kind of jealous of the phoneme SCHWA ?

Because it's never stressed!