A simple eating habit can revolutionise your wellbeing

Commensality – the act of sharing meals – can reduce your risk of depression and dementia.

It sounds almost too good to be true, but one simple change to your eating habits could do wonders for your body and brain. It can reduce your risk of depression and protect you from dementia. It can increase the pleasure you take in your food, and perhaps even cause you to live longer.

We're not talking about a new fad diet, but one of humanity's most ancient practices: commensality, or the act of eating with others. "The sharing of meals is an essential mechanism for bonding and building trust and connecting with others," says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioural science as the University of Oxford. And that has serious repercussions for our wellbeing.

Sadly, the increased isolation of the modern world is making this increasingly unusual. But it might be easier than you'd think to reach out to others and harness the ancient connection between food and friendship.

Building mental resilience

Much of the research on commensality has focused on its consequences for our mental health. One study, by Xinyi Wang and colleagues at the Zhejiang Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in China, involved surveying 9,361 women aged 60 and over. It found that the number of people sitting around the table at mealtimes was a clear predictor of someone's risk of depression. This remained the case even after the team had controlled for a host of other factors that are known to influence people's wellbeing, such as their general health and wealth, and whether or not that person lived alone.

This, the team concluded, suggests that there was something unique about commensality that affects our mental health.

Many other studies point to the same conclusions. Researchers from Tokyo, for instance, found that people aged 65-74 who lived with their families, yet ate alone, had five times the odds of developing depressive symptoms than those who regularly ate in company. 

Arguably the strongest evidence comes from the World Happiness Report – a yearly analysis of wellbeing based on a global survey from the opinion polling company Gallup. In 2024, the company was sponsored by the Japanese food manufacturer Ajinomoto to add a section on people's eating habits, which included the following questions: 

Thinking about the last 7 days …

(1) On how many days did you eat lunch with someone you know?

(2) On how many days did you eat dinner with someone you know?" 

"My eyes lit up when I saw," De Neve says, who co-authored a chapter on the importance of commensality in the latest World Happiness Report. "We're looking at about 150,000 individuals around the world who responded to that question." 

De Neve's team found that the more meals that people shared with others, the higher they scored on standard measures of emotional wellbeing, with quite astonishing consistency. "It was as predictive of someone's life satisfaction as their employment status and your relative income," he says – two factors that are known to be enormously important for wellbeing. 

De Neve emphasises that the questions about meal sharing may simply serve as a "proxy" of someone's general social life – but he suspects there is something special about eating........

© BBC