In this episode, I talk about research that examined the importance of having parents eating family dinners with their kids.
I discuss this article:
Is frequency of shared family meals related to the nutritional health of children and adolescents?
Pediatrics. 2011 Jun;127(6):e1565-74. doi: 10.1542/peds.2010-1440. Epub 2011 May 2. PMID: 21536618; PMCID: PMC3387875.
Use this as a starting point to evaluate your family's dinner habits.
Hope it is helpful.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
To get a free copy of 30 healthy and easy recipes for teens that are high in protein, visit
https://lifestyleforteens.com/recipes
To learn more about the LIFT Program, visit lifestyleforteens.com/program
In this episode, I talk about research that examined the importance of having parents eating family dinners with their kids.
I discuss this article:
Is frequency of shared family meals related to the nutritional health of children and adolescents?
Pediatrics. 2011 Jun;127(6):e1565-74. doi: 10.1542/peds.2010-1440. Epub 2011 May 2. PMID: 21536618; PMCID: PMC3387875.
Use this as a starting point to evaluate your family's dinner habits.
Hope it is helpful.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
To get a free copy of 30 healthy and easy recipes for teens that are high in protein, visit
https://lifestyleforteens.com/recipes
To learn more about the LIFT Program, visit lifestyleforteens.com/program
Are you getting frustrated with what to feed a teenager who is always hungry? Everybody knows that teenagers have a huge appetite. It seems like you need to feed them constantly to satisfy their hunger. It's even more difficult where teenagers who struggle with their weight truly want to make changes like cut down on junk food or stop ever eating, and they can't. There is frustration, isolation, stress, and that's why I decided to create a recipe collection of 30 easy and healthy meals for teenagers. They are all high in protein to satisfy your teenager's hunger and they can all be ready in less than 30 minutes. If you want to grab a free copy, go to lifestyleforteenscom for the last recipes.
Speaker 2:This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgary does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, dr Jenny Gorgary. Hi there.
Speaker 1:This is Dr Gorgary again. I'm here with you again for another episode. Today I'm going to discuss an issue that often has come up with conversations with family. When we are trying to build healthy habits right, one of the things that we should strive to succeed in is having regular meals as a family Like. Have you ever heard that before? Have you been told that having family meals like, meaning that we all sit on the table as a family and eat our meals together is overall contributing to well-being, but also to a healthier weight and a healthier relationship with food? And how often does this happen? Ask yourself, how often do you sit down and have meal as a family parents and children all together every week and I know it cannot happen for every meal. Some people don't even have breakfast, or kids maybe at school when it's lunchtime, at least in the United States. It may be different in other countries, but in general, ask yourself, how many times do we eat as a family all together same time in a week? Okay, so put that aside for a second. I just want to first put up that question for you, so you have somewhere to begin with, and then I'm just going to present a very interesting article that it was published in 2011 in the Journal of Pediatrics, which is one of the biggest journals in the field of pediatrics. It was done by Dr Hammons and her group. It was done in the University of Illinois in the United States. The title of this article is is frequency of shared family meals related to the nutritional health of children and adolescents?
Speaker 1:So what the authors try to answer is they actually try to find what is the scientific evidence that eating family meals together can actually lead to healthier weight, healthier relationship with food, lower risk to develop body image issues and disordered eating. So, in order to answer this very important question, what they did is they put together different other studies that had looked at this subject and then they put all the data together. If you recall, I have mentioned this before this is what we called a meta-analytic study, like where they don't conduct the study themselves, but they put all the previous studies together and then they reanalyze all the data. So they analyzed data from 17 different studies. That's a lot of studies. The total number of children that participated in this research from all the different 17 studies was 182,836 children. That's a huge number 182,000 children. So that's a lot of data. Why is this important? Because the more people you have in a study, the more likely it is that the study is important and that the results you take out you're more confident that, yes, you're closer to the truth.
Speaker 1:So what did the authors try to investigate? So they were really focusing on three things. First, they wanted to look whether having a family meals altogether is associated with having a healthy weight or being overweight. They wanted to see whether having a family meals altogether is associated with having healthier habits for around meals, like, for example, eating more fruits and vegetables, whether sitting down and having family meals together was associated with less risk of having disordered eating behavior. In order to answer this question, as I mentioned, they pulled all different studies together that they had bring together data from how frequently do we eat meals together? So they looked at studies that they had already collected data on family meals. They looked at studies that already have collected data about weight gain, food consumption, healthy eating, disordered eating, and they collected data about the age of the children and the sex, the gender of the population, and they looked mostly at studies that they were done at one point in time. They had a smaller percentage of studies that they looked over time, but I'm just going to focus on those studies that they just looked at one point in time.
Speaker 1:So how did they define when we say we have shared family meal times, like what do they mean? So, in order to make it easy for them to analyze the studies, they really divided the meal times into groups. First there were the group of people that they were having at least three meals per week together and those that they had three or more meals per week, and then they divided. They also had another group of families where they shared less than three family meals together. Okay, so, going back to my original question, which group does your family belong to? Do you tend to have at least three or more times per week meals as a family, or do you have meals less than three times per week?
Speaker 1:Okay, so the first thing they looked is, when they analyzed all the studies, that they were looking at the weight like, trying to find how does that? The frequency of family meals is associated with being healthy weight or overweight. They looked at a total number of 182,000 participants and the age of the children that participated on the study was between 2.8 and 17.3 years, so let's say three to 17 years of age and the studies were from different countries around the world United States, australia, canada, finland, japan, new Zealand so it was like multicultural, and they were roughly 50% girls, 50% boys. So what they found was that the majority of families had meals together five to seven nights per week. So half of the families had meals most days per week, five to seven, and there was a 31% that shared one to four meals together and there was a 14% that did not share any meals together during the week. So then they looked at the studies and like, how does that relate to weight? That was the first main focus point of the study, right? So the studies that looked at the weight included 44,016 participants. The ages were between four to 17 years of age.
Speaker 1:And what did they find? The authors found that children and adolescents were 12% less likely to be overweight in families that had at least three shared family meals per week than those who ate fewer than three shared family meals per week. So 12% less likely to be overweight if you have family meals that at least three times per week. So three times per week is not like an every time, like every meal we're eating together, but even three times per week gives an important benefit, let's say, over the children that don't have that shared the opportunity to have shared family meals.
Speaker 1:The second thing they looked at was the eating habits right Eating healthier, having healthier choices right and what they found was that children that had at least three family meals per week had a 20% reduction of eating unhealthy foods Again, or the other way to rephrase that is, if you're eating at least three family meals per week, you have 20 percent increase of your chances to eating healthier and having healthier choices. When they looked at different age groups like when they looked at how is this different between high school children versus children that are younger they actually found that the effect was even more significant close to 25 percent in older children and adolescents. The older children and adolescents can benefit more by adopting healthy behaviors when they sit down and have family meals with their parents. Another thing they looked at is the consumption of fruits, vegetables, having breakfast and taking multivitamins. There were a few studies that have looked at that, but those few studies suggested that families that shared meals at least three times per week they had a 24 percent increase chances of having kids that were be eating healthier food options, like vegetables, fruits, and that they would have better dietary habits than those who families did not have that frequency of sitting together and having meals together. When the other outcome the investigators looked at was the frequency of disordered eating behaviors, like some anorexia sublimia, all this abnormal, distorted body images, all these unhealthy behaviors that fall into the category of disordered eating behavior, what they found was that adolescents that were living with families that had at least five meals per week, well, 35 percent less likely to engage in disorder eating behavior than those who did not share at least five meals per week. I repeat that because this is very important. Other lessons that were having at least five meals per week with their families were 35 percent less likely to engage in disordered eating behavior than those who didn't. So, to summarize, this is a great study that gave us really data with numbers, and where the investigators actually found significant differences in terms of the being overweight or having a regular weight, in terms of eating behaviors, having eating more fruits, vegetables, and also less likely to have a disorder eating behavior or distorted body image and on Rex's and all that if families sit together than those families who don't sit together as frequently.
Speaker 1:So why is this important? Like what is the take home message from this study? This is very important because how many times a family sits down and have meals together is in your control, like today. If you're answered the first question, I ask you like how many times on average do you have meals together? If you fall in the category that you have less than three meals per week, this is something that you could potentially decide to change if you wanted to have a stronger and a benefit to your child's weight and health behavior overall. You can decide to change that today. You can make a plan. You can restructure your lifestyle and make the decision that, starting today, you're going to have to put an effort into having three or more meals per week as a family.
Speaker 1:And why is this important? I mean, we don't really have any studies that look at what we call causative relationship. Like this is where we need to have bigger studies where we would look at interventions, where we would take families and ask them to do that over time, and then we will monitor those families over time, from the beginning and after a few years, and see whether that has a real effect. But this study is just the first signal and there are some hypotheses we can make of. Why is this happening, like why do you think that people that sit together, their children, weigh less, they are less likely to be obese and overweight, they are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables and they are less likely to have body image disorder and distorted eating behavior. Why is that? First of all, the family that eat together, by definition, implies that there is a better relationship among the family members. So when there is a better relationship between parents and their children, problems around food can be communicated in a better way and parents can be more aware of when there is something going on with an eating pattern of their kids. They can detect it, they can intervene, they can do something about it, they can have a discussion about it, they can go more into details about why is this happening here, what can we do, and so on. So having a better relationship between parents and children is very important in terms of maintaining good weight.
Speaker 1:Another reason is that often children just learn by example, right? Don't we hear that all the time? Like if you want to teach something to your kid, you don't necessarily need to give them the speech. Just show them with your own life. Lead by your own example is as true for meals as it is true for other life lessons. Right? So you want your kids to have to eat vegetables, to eat more fruits? Have a fruit yourself. Show them how this is done. This is the best way to give healthy messages around food.
Speaker 1:Okay, another third reason that having family meals can lead to decreased risk for being overweight is the fact that when most families eat together, it is a meal that most likely someone has cooked In the house. It's not like junk food from a restaurant. So it tends to imply also that there is more effort into preparing healthier meals than going out and having meals with the restaurants or other unhealthy places. So one last point I want to say, which the authors bring up and I think it's important, is that in some of these studies they asked specifically the adolescents how did they feel about having family meals, and most of them said that they actually liked the family meals. They felt it improves the family relationship and that they would like their parents to prepare healthy meals at home and they would like them to be more involved with their healthy eating behavior.
Speaker 1:And, of course, I do understand trust me, I do understand all the difficulties around having family meals together. Like parent work schedules may be off and difficult. A lot of parents have to work nights, have to work late evenings. There can be difficulties in even cooking and having a home meal prepared. There are some children that may be picky eaters and may be harder to control. Some schools have kids have school activities where they may have to play sports or they may have to do homework or they may have to go and learn music or learn another language and a million other activities. So I do understand all the coordination and all the difficulties that take place and, of course, my role.
Speaker 1:I'm not here to tell you how to lead your life and what to do. Of course I am here just to offer you the evidence of the research that has been done so far and maybe bring up that question to you. First of all, realize how frequently do you eat meals together and is there something you can do about it? Is there something that you can change in your schedule? Increase the amount of meals that you spend together as a family and that will have maybe that will have more chances that your children will make healthier choices, maybe at a lower risk for overweight and maybe lower risk for distorted eating behaviors. I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and if you're looking for healthy recipes to cook for dinner with your family, go to lifestyle14scom for us last recipes and download the 30 recipes I've put together for teens. Take care and have a lovely rest of your week. Bye-bye.
Speaker 2:If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, I invite you to come check out the Lifts program. It's Dr Gorgherie's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms, where we take all this information, we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier, more confident, less stressed and love their body again. Visit the website at lifestyle14scom and click on the work with me and free resources to learn more about this program and get free health to start this journey right away. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of lifestyle and weight loss for teens.