The health benefits of eating together
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Hello and welcome to Zoe Shorts, the BiteSide podcast where we discuss one topic around science and nutrition. I'm Jonathan Wolf and as always I'm joined by Dr. Sarah Berry and today's subject is social eating. It's reasonable to think that the food you eat is the only factor in how healthy your diet is, right?

But what we're seeing now is that that's not strictly true. It turns out how you eat, including who you eat with, might be important too. So Sarah, are you saying that eating with other people could be better for you than eating alone?

There's some surprising evidence showing that social eating may have a whole range of emotional and physical benefits. Believe it or not, there's some evidence to show that eating together can even make food taste better. Amazing. So is that too good to be true? Let's dig into it and find out. Picture two kitchen tables. It's an average Wednesday night. One table is covered in dishes of delicious food. The whole family's gathered around chatting and enjoying the meal.

On the second table, there's one solitary figure scrolling on their phone at the same time as they're eating. And just listening to this, I know which table I'd rather be at. Me too, but eating alone is on the increase. And a UK survey from 2017 showed that a third of weekday evening meals are eaten in isolation.

And the average adult eats 10 out of 21 meals alone every week. And similarly in the US, about a quarter of dinners are also eaten alone. Now that's likely because of the pressure of busy lifestyles. So just think about last night, you know, my wife was out, so I was eating on my own. There's an ageing population, so increasing number of people who may be living on their own, and just the general increase in single person households.

And let me guess, despite all of this, actually eating alone is the one that's bad for you? It's been associated with disordered eating behaviours, depressive symptoms, obesity and high blood pressure. So rather a depressing list, Jonathan. Yeah, that doesn't sound that great. Yeah, and also we know that the diet quality, so how healthy the food is that people are eating, is actually lower in people who eat alone than in people who eat together.

So I'm assuming then that there's plenty of benefits to eating together. Yeah, let's break this down into some different categories. So first of all, there's the social and the emotional aspect. And research has shown that people who eat socially...

more often feel happier and are more satisfied with their life. They're also more trusting of others and are more engaged with their local communities. So that about sums me up, I think, Jonathan. I think that's right. And I'm also somebody who's not very keen to be on their own for too long, which is a problem for someone who spends a great deal of time sitting in their attic in their office like this. And I think what you're saying is that eating together leads to sort of social bonding. And that sounds good. But

But what if we can't eat together in person? And, you know, I think the obvious thing we've all experienced was the pandemic when we had this sort of this forced isolation, maybe with our families, maybe entirely on our own. What happened there?

Yeah, excellent question, Jonathan. And there's actually some evidence that even coming together digitally, so whether it be over Zoom, for example, but to eat meals digitally together can have some positive effects. But of course, it wouldn't replace the benefits of that in real life social eating. So, I mean, all that community stuff makes sense. The bond is very important.

What about actually the food we eat? Are there actually dietary benefits of social eating? So that's where things get interesting. And I'd love to talk about the rate at which we eat first. And I know this is something you've got really interested in, Sarah. So I think there's some evidence that the faster you eat, the more energy you consume and the bigger the blood sugar spike in your body. So what happens in a social setting? Do we eat faster or slower?

So it hasn't been very well studied, but what research does show currently is that if you eat in a social setting, you tend to eat a little bit more slowly, but you tend to eat a little bit more slowly.

That's interesting. So you might actually eat more food because you're with other people than on your own, but over a longer period of time. And I know if Tim was here, he would immediately talk about the way that people eat in Spain and Italy and all the places that he likes to be in the summer with these sort of big family meals spread out over hours and that that is just a much better natural diet.

way for us to eat. And Sarah, it sounds like you're saying there is some evidence for this. And yet, interestingly, you eat some more food if you are in that context than if you're just wolfing it down on your own, looking at your phone. Yeah, so I think there's a couple of great things we could pick up on there. So one is about being distracted. So we know from research that if you eat while watching TV, you tend to eat more than if you were to not

be watching the television because you're distracted. So there is that kind of social distraction that you're in that social setting, you're distracted and you're eating in a more automated way. So you might eat a little bit more.

But on the other side of the coin is that by eating more slowly, you're reducing these big sudden spikes that you might get in blood sugar from eating really rapidly, which we know is unfavorable in terms of our health. So I think it's kind of balanced itself out really. That's interesting. And what about the impact on the sort of nutritional quality of what people are eating?

That's really a key upside, I think, is the nutritional benefits. And it's been observed that children who had less frequent family meals had a lower diet quality, so consumed less healthy foods than those who ate family meals every day.

We know that also when families sit down together, adolescents, so teenagers, have more fruits and vegetables. They have less soft drinks and less fast food. And they also have a better intake of protein, calcium, iron, folate, fiber, vitamins, which is so important for enjoying those teenage years. I think if anyone has teenage children as I do, they'll just be listening to that and saying that is so true.

Given this, we're saying that food quality is higher, but actually you might eat more calories. It's sort of interesting that you're saying we might have better health outcomes. And I guess, again, that tells you that the amount of calories you eat in any particular meal is not very important and it's sort of the health

quality of the food that's important. Is there any risk that all of this is not really to do with food quality, but because homes that share meals are homes that, for example, might have the money to buy fresh food or

have the sort of lifestyles, which again is related to their work, which means they have the time and energy to cook and eat together? Yeah, that's possible, Jonathan. It's one of the reasons why research in this area, and in fact, research around anything to do with diet and health is so, so complicated.

What we eat and how we eat is so linked to how we live our lives. And so it's really difficult to separate the effects of eating together from all the other potential contributing factors like you just listed. You know, as with anything in nutritional research, we need to do lots more work in order to disentangle this. And the only way we can do this is by doing the huge kind of studies that we're doing now.

Zoe with our PREDICT studies, where we can look at lots and lots of different factors and collect a huge amount of data that really gives us that cross section of how people live their lives and all of the different exposures that might shape their responses to food.

I think that's right. And I guess the other thing that's really, I think, anecdotal but striking is if you're eating in a group, you're more likely to cook the meal and it's less likely to be something that's ultra processed. Right. And, you know, just to remind everybody, ultra processed is something which is made in a way that you couldn't do in your kitchen. And we think about something that you put in the microwave or you warm up.

I wonder whether we're talking about social eating, part of this element is coming from this human interaction, but it seems plausible to me also that this is changing the sort of food that you eat. And I know that when I'm on my own, it's a lot easier to just say, you know what, it's not worth cooking this thing from scratch. It's a lot of effort. Actually, you're much more likely to waste it, right? It's harder to use up these ingredients.

And, you know, if you have people coming round cooking for the whole family, somehow it just makes more sense to do this cooking. So is it possible that part of what we're seeing here is just in the way that we know that we eat so much more ultra processed food in the UK and the US where we tend to eat much more individually than people do in, say, Italy, where they eat still more together and they eat much less ultra processed food? Could this be an important part of the story?

I think so. And I think from a practical point of view, it's actually quite difficult to cook a really diverse meal for one individual consuming in isolation without a lot of food wastage. And so I think this is really important to factor in as well, that we know that dietary diversity, and by this I mean,

a diverse amount of ingredients within a meal or over a week is really, really important for our health, particularly for our gut microbiome. So increasing the diversity of different plant-based foods we know is a really simple strategy to improve the health of our microbiome, which we know has far-reaching health effects. Now, if I'm only cooking a meal for myself, I'm not going to go and buy

10 different plants or 10 different ingredients because a lot of it might go in the bin. And so this is one reason why people eating on their own will not be consuming the same diversity. And for example, my sister lives alone. She would love to eat the kind of meals that we were brought up as a family eating. And sometimes she's great and she might pre-prepare at the weekend and freeze.

But nine times out of 10, she doesn't have the time. So she'll go and buy quick, you know, ready-made meals, or she'll use really simple ingredients like her go-to is pesto pasta, probably three nights a week, because she knows there won't be any waste. She's a primary school teacher. She can't afford to be wasting the food. And also from a kind of planetary health perspective, we want to minimize food waste as well. So there's a really practical element to this as well.

And you know what? This being the ZOE podcast, I think we need to talk a little bit about those trillions of bacterial friends. And actually, we found a really fantastic paper that was published in Nature just a couple of years ago, looking at the microbiome and how it varied depending upon your relationships. And what it showed is that people with close relationships are

have a more diverse microbiome, they're more different species of bacteria, which we know is generally better for you. And interestingly, that married individuals had greater diversity and richness of their microbiome relative to those who are living on their own. So Sarah, on balance, you know, we covered a lot of different aspects. What do you think? Can social eating be better for us than eating alone?

Well, I think from my own personal perspective, social eating is fun.

I think the evidence shows that eating alone is associated with a number of negative outcomes, including depressive symptoms and higher blood pressure. We also know that eating together promotes social bonding. It promotes that emotional well-being that I'm sure we can all relate to. And importantly, we know that for children, eating with their families, they tend to eat better quality meals. They tend to have a higher quality nutrients as well.

Now, the research isn't very clear on the health benefits, although it has been suggested that there might be beneficial effects on cardiovascular health, obesity and microbiome health, as you very nicely outlined for us. But I think, again, it's one of these areas that I'm really excited what the research in the future will unravel.

Wonderful. Sarah, thank you for taking us through this today. And I think that was a fun topic for this time of year. If you'd like to understand what to eat when social eating, then why not try Zoe's personalized nutrition program to improve your health? You can get 10% off by going to joinzoe.com slash podcast. I'm Jonathan Wolfe. And I'm Sarah Berry. Join us next week for another Zoe podcast.