Improve Adolescents\’ Eating Habits with Regular Family Meal Times

By Paul Shipgood

A recently published report reveals that families who adopt regular family meal times were shown to significantly improve the eating habits of their children who were in early to middle adolescence. It seems that good eating habits can in fact be achieved when families sit down to eat together.

In the report, documented in the March/April 2009 issue of the (American) “Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior” researchers from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health found that as children matured from their early through to their middle adolescence years regularly participating in meals with the rest of their family contributed to long-term benefits in the quality of their diet.

The study found that generally adolescents who sat down to regular family meals had healthier diets and meal patterns compared to those who didn”t.

The study was conducted among an ethnically diverse sample of young adolescents, aged about 12 to 13 years old, and then again on the same group in their middle adolescence about five years later. The study sample comprised 303 boys and 374 girls defined as being adolescents.

It defined regular family meals as being five or more meals taken together each week. These were found to decline over time with sixty percent of the youths having regular family meals during the period defined as early adolescence compared to only 30% during the later period.

Those children who had been found to have participated in regular family meals in both early and middle adolescence showed a marked increase in the later assessment in their consumption of both breakfast and dinner, together with increased intakes of vegetables, foods rich in calcium, dietary fibre, and several other essential nutrients such as iron, magnesium, potassium, and zinc.

An important finding, though, was that on average those adolescents who hadn”t enjoyed regular family meals at both the early and middle adolescence stages of the study had a much poorer quality diet than those who had.

This finding is consistent with current research identifying the dietary intake of fruits, vegetables, whole-grain cereals, potassium, magnesium, vitamin E, and dietary fibre as being less than sufficient for this particular age group.

Researcher, Teri Burgess-Champoux, said, “These findings suggest that having regular family meals during the transition from early to middle adolescence positively impacts the development of healthful eating behaviors for youth”. She went on to say, “The importance of incorporating shared mealtime experiences on a consistent basis during this key developmental period should be emphasized to parents, health care providers, and educators”.

About The Author

Paul Shipgood writes as ”Grampa Starling” in his blog: GrampaSaidSo.com - a resource for parents, grandparents and senior citizens: for coping with the problems of living with youngsters through to the problems old age can present.