Family members frequently enjoy meals even without kids

A new study has demonstrated that couples and other adult family members who live without kids in the house eat frequent family meals at home.

Researchers analyzed data on more than 14,000 Ohio adults, and compared family-meal patterns among adults who lived with minor children to households with at least two adult family members and no children under age 19 living with them.

Rachel Tumin, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the Ohio State University and lead author of the study, said that there were a lot of families that did not have children and they had forgotten about them in this context of thinking about sharing food and time together and what that means.

Senior author Sarah Anderson, said that most people value family meals and engaged in this behavior.

The prevalence of never eating family meals or eating together only once a week was low and they thought the distribution would be different, and they hypothesized that adults with children would be much more likely to eat together as a family.

The research showed that in almost all cases, the similarities between groups held even when demographic factors influenced the frequency of family meals.

The study is published in the journal Public Health Nutrition.