In Australia, family meals often happen in the evening because it is one of the few times of day families are at home at the same time. The answer might relate to food quality, screen use, mealtime atmosphere or family conversations. So, we do not know with certainty the family meal is beneficial for health, only that there's a statistical link between families that eat together and family health.Īnd we do not know which aspect of the family meal may be responsible. And they measured "success" differently across studies, making them hard to compare. Researchers didn't look at factors like physical activity, screen time and sleep separately. But we weren't able to provide conclusive answers, largely due to limitations with study designs. Our previous systematic review attempted to unpack this relationship. It might be just as likely that families who eat well are more likely to eat together.īut how can we make family meals more realistic and less stressful? But these studies cannot tell us whether the family gathering over a meal is causing these outcomes. Research tells us families who eat together frequently are more likely to have better diets, better family functioning and children with higher self-esteem. This combination can make achieving family meals difficult, if not impossible, for many families. But the modern reality includes time-poor families, fussy eaters, siblings at odds and stress about what meals to cook - not to mention cost-of-living pressures.
We have been told that to achieve these proposed benefits we must follow an idealistic, age-old formula all family members at the table, happily sharing a home-cooked meal and chatting without distractions. This article was originally published on The Conversation.Įating together regularly as a family has long been promoted as a simple solution for improving health and wellbeing.
0 kommentar(er)
