Family Meals: The Secret Weapon Against Childhood Obesity

When everyone’s home, I sometimes feel like a short order cook. Lunch, dinner, breakfast, I cook it all up with a smile. Mostly.

This means more dishes and more headaches. Today, for example, my older son and my husband both sat down to lunch late and Raymond had just a few bites of potato salad and a few mouthfuls of chicken. Sigh.

But the good news is that children of parents who cook at home and who eat together as a family are less likely to be obese. This was one of the interesting points food advocate Michael Pollan made in his piece in the New York Times Magazine Sunday on how cooking is becoming a spectator sport, with watching cooking shows becoming more popular than actually cooking.

In an interview on NPR, Pollan explained that many adults are watching an hour of cooking shows while spending only half an hour on meal preparation.

I don’t watch cooking shows and I usually spend half an hour to an hour at the most on meal preparation because who has time? I tend to get a bit huffy when people start ranting about not enough time being spent in the kitchen because in most houses it’s the mom who spends time in the kitchen. And if Mom doesn’t want to lovingly prepare meals after working all day, that’s her prerogative.

That said, I do spend time lovingly preparing meals because I believe in them. Yes, we are having hot dogs for dinner tonight. But on most nights, I at least slice up some vegetables for my little darlings.

It turns out all the alarm over the disappearance of family meals may be overblown. Researchers who tracked 14,000 children from 1996 to 1999 in the “Growing Up Today,” study released earlier this year found that 84 percent said they eat home most days or every day. The other good news for all those families who do have a family dinner hour is that the children who did eat at home most days were 15 percent more likely to be obese. (See an article on the study and other obesity studies here).

The researchers noted that while family dinners may not prevent obesity, they at least ensure that children are getting good food. The obesity rate for children ages 2 to 5 increased from a 1976 to 2000 study to a 2003 to 2006 study from 5 to 12 percent, and from 6 to 17 percent among 6 to 11 year olds, according to the CDC.

There are complex reasons for obesity that go deeper than family meals. But it’s good to know while I’m sweating over that hot stove, that I’m keeping my kids healthy when I’m, keeping them away from McDonald’s.