Drinking Water With Meals Leads to Healthier Food Choices


 Posted by Susan Bowerman, M.S., RD, CSSD, CSOWM, FAND – Senior Director, Worldwide Nutrition Education and Training  0 Comment

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It’s the natural beverage for healthy foods.

Do you drink water with meals or do you choose soda, hot drinks or alcohol? What you drink could affect what foods you choose to eat.

We tend to pay a lot more attention to what we eat than what we drink. We usually decide on a beverage after we’ve decided what we’re going to eat.

But there are times when the beverage calls the shots. Pour yourself a glass of cold milk and you’re suddenly craving a chocolate chip cookie. A steaming mug of coffee brings on the urge for a sugary donut on the side. And is there anyone who hasn’t noticed that beer pairs really well with salty, fatty foods—like pizza, hot dogs and peanuts? Okay, so if certain beverages can steer you to eat the wrong foods, is it possible that other beverages could help you make better choices? Researchers at the University of Oregon and Michigan State University think so.

Findings from a study published last week in the journal Appetite1 suggest that having water as a beverage might improve our food choices at meals. The researchers performed two very simple experiments, designed to figure out if certain food-beverage combinations are preferences that we develop early on.

First, the researchers surveyed 60 young adults to get their thoughts on various food and drink combos. And the findings were clear: soda goes great with pizza and French fries, but it’s a lousy drink when you’re chowing down on raw or steamed veggies. Those foods, they said, call for water.

In the second study, 75 preschoolers were offered a snack of raw carrots and bell peppers, which were served on two separate occasions with either water or fruit punch. Not surprisingly, the kids drank more punch than plain water – it’s sweet, after all. But the interesting thing was that the kids ate more vegetables when they were served water than they did when they were served punch.

The findings suggest that kids may learn very early on to pair certain beverages with certain foods (soda goes with fatty, salty foods, not with vegetables), and they carry those preferences with them as they grow up. It means that if you expose kids to the soda-salt-fat combo over and over throughout childhood, then every time they drink a sugary drink, the palate gets primed for the burger, fries and pizza that’s sure to follow.

And so, the authors said, if the beverage choice determines whether we do (or don’t) eat our vegetables, then maybe it’s time to think about the beverage first—since the right one could steer us to make better choices at mealtime.

It’ll surely take more than a one-two punch of veggies and water to knock out the childhood obesity epidemic. But if kids learn early on to associate healthy beverages with healthy foods, it might just encourage them to eat more vegetables – and that’s a great place to start.

1 Cornwall, TB and McAlister AR. Contingent Choice: Exploring the Relationship Between Sweetened Beverages and Vegetable Consumption. Appetite, 2012 (epub ahead of print)

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Susan is the Senior Director of Worldwide Nutrition Education and Training at Herbalife, where she is responsible for the development of nutrition education and training materials, and is one of the primary authors of the Herbalife-sponsored blog, www.discovergoodnutrition.com. She is a Registered Dietitian and holds two Board Certifications from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics as a Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics, and a Certified Specialist in Obesity and Weight Management. Susan is also a Fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Susan graduated with distinction in biology from the University of Colorado, and received her master’s degree in Food Science and Nutrition from Colorado State University. She then completed her dietetic internship at the University of Kansas. Susan has taught extensively and developed educational programs targeted to individuals, groups and industry in her areas of expertise, including health promotion, weight management and sports nutrition. Prior to her role at Herbalife, she was the assistant director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, and has held appointments as adjunct professor in nutrition at Pepperdine University and as lecturer in nutrition in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Susan was a consultant to the (then) Los Angeles Raiders for six seasons, and was a contributing columnist for the Los Angeles Times Health Section for two years. She is a co-author of 23 research papers, 14 book chapters, and was a co-author of two books for the public: “What Color is Your Diet?” and “The L.A. Shape Diet” by Dr. David Heber, published by Harper Collins in 2001 and 2004, respectively.