Oh good, I’m not the only one who was confused. Whew.
Considering it was a refutation of a claim that drinking while eating prevented accurately judging your food intake by flushing food into your intestine before it contributed to you feeling full, I’d hazard the guess the meaning of the first sentence should be reversed.
Right on! My mother banned water and other liquids at meals because it would ruin our appetites (for food, of course). If only…, but that was the typical Jewish mother attitude. A fat kid (which I was) is a healthy kid. Oh yes, and throw food on their plate even they are full and then say, “You can eat a little more.” I still don’t drink water with meals (except at restaurants), although maybe I should. My wife was raised on the same regime.
I’ve heard of this off and on throughout the years and I agree, the explanations have always been full of woo.
Every time you kill a kitten, God masticates.
It’s just a bit of folklore - there are similar things about not combining certain foods and/or drinks (for example, milk with fish - some versions say this will make you sick, other versions say it will kill you)
Were you a young child when you were told?
Because with young children, as well as elderly people, the foremost concern I can see is “stuff going down the wrong pipe”: risk of getting the drink into the air pipe and coughing.
Besides, it’s also bad table manners. You’re supposed to take your time to enjoy the meal that somebody spent time preparing, not hog it down like a wild pig.
So you eat one bite fully and swallow before you speak, and you swallow your bite and wipe your mouth before taking a drink from your glass. (this is not only more polite, but again also reduces the risk of choking).
What I heard as kid was “don’t drink so much water, or you will be full too soon”, meaning that the water was empty, so I would be hungry after 1 or 2 hours, but the next meal would be 4 hours away. With the big portions of today, this is a different problem.
Let me try that again.
I was responding to this part:
Sentence one is wrong because food is not being flushed through the body faster. You don’t feel you’re full too late. You feel full sooner. Sentence two is wrong because eating a meal without drinking **slows **your awareness of being full.
Is that better?
And Alley Dweller, those with smaller stomachs are told specifically not to have soup, at least in the early stages of recovery.
Your stomach does literally shrink as it is emptied and then stretches when food is supplied. That creates the signals that tell you of fullness - and if you eat too much of feeling stuffed or very uncomfortable. Surgery that removes part of the stomach or the similar surgery that puts a band around the stomach eliminates how far a stomach can stretch and thus produces the signals of fullness much faster. If your stomach is literally tiny, even a small amount of liquid will set off the trigger. You will stop eating before you get nutritional sufficiency. That’s not the same as liquids flushing foods through, which would produce the opposite effect - allowing you to eat more.
My parents had a rule about not drinking anything at the table while eating - only afterwards was it permitted.
And they were both physicians. No health justifications were used, it just seemed to be a kind of warped etiquette.
Around age 12 or so I began ignoring the rule and drank beverages while eating (first major rebellion). 
Never heard of this either.
As you noted, liquids don’t flush the food through. This is why it’s so difficult to drink a gallon of milk in an hour. Pure water will pass through your stomach in short order, but a water-based slurry of fats and proteins (e.g. dinner ingested along with a glass or two of water) will be retained for a considerable time.
Liquid is shorthand for a continuum from water to sludge. Even so-called solid foods can be mostly water, as with many fruits. It’s easier to talk about the effects of one end of one spectrum vs. the end of the other spectrum, but the real world is much more complicated than that.
Milk is a good example in many ways. People with lactose intolerance are told that having food move more slowly through their intestines puts the food in contact longer with the lactase-making cells so there is a greater chance that more will be digested and fewer symptoms develop. Eating dairy as a part of meals is a known way to reduce symptoms over just having a glass of milk by itself. There’s some evidence that even the added bulk of chocolate milk produces fewer symptoms than white milk.
And at the extremes of digestibility, see eating contests, especially hot dog contests where the champs dip the buns in water to make them easier to get down, but which adds to the bulk.
Speaking as someone who just had a vertical sleeve gastrectomy after going through six months of bariatric surgery education from a nationally-recognized bariatric center of excellence… what you’ve written here is COMPLETELY THE OPPOSITE of what bariatric surgeons tell people.
Perhaps the medical professionals are wrong, but what we were explicitly and repeatedly told is the following:
- Stop drinking 30 minutes before eattng.
- Take no more than 30 minutes to eat.
- Begin drinking no sooner than 30 minutes after eating.
The reason for this iron-clad rule? Drinking before you eat lubricates the stomach, drinking while you eat flushes food through that you instead want to sit in your stomach to provide that “full” feeling.
Period, full stop.
The worry about a stomach increasing in size is a long-term worry, but that’s unrelated to combining liquids with solid food, instead focused merely on overeating solid food. Even then, the risks vary by surgery (lowest with Lap Band- overeating will likely cause the band to slip well before it increases the size of your pouch-- and highest with gastric bypass, not because it increases your stomach size but because it risks blowing out the new sphincter point at the bottom of your re-directed stomach).
The only other fact that’s somewhat related to this is a prohibition against carbonation for fear that carbonated drinks can expand the stomach unnecessarily; however, the research is very inconclusive in that arena, so it’s more of a precaution than anything (practically, carbonation is rarely well-tolerated, particularly by bypass or sleeve patients, but there are even exceptions there).
Anyway… perhaps my surgeons were wrong, but the reason they gave was clear: at least with a bariatrically-reduced stomach, combining liquids and solid foods is a recipe for rapid movement of the solid food into the small intestine, and thus defeats the purpose of having the bariatric surgery (i.e., artificially restrict your stomach size to keep smaller amounts of food inside your stomach longer until it signals your brain that it’s full). Their empirical evidence is that the number one reason for bariatric failure is returning to the habit of drinking while eating.
Please note: none of this may apply to a normal stomach. In fact, I’d be surprised if it did.
Because it supposedly makes digestion faster and makes you hungrier, or something like that. (So I heard)
Harvey & Marilyn Diamond of the Fit For Life Diet give the “liquids dilute stomach acids” explanation.
Macrobiotics is very down on drinking anything. They believe you should only drink enough to pee twice a day!
I always drink at least 10 glasses of fluid a day. If I haven’t had at least eight by suppertime, I find myself gulping my drink and ignoring my food.
I agree completely that’s the medical advice.
My understanding from reading a lot on the subject is not at all what you said. There’s no such thing as lubricating the stomach. Drinking does not flush food through.
Life After Bariatric Surgery: The Weight Loss Surgery Lifestyle
Notice the mention of dumping syndrome. That is a possible problem, but it is not caused strictly from liquids, but by consuming the wrong foods in the wrong way.
I’m guessing you’re remembering the warning about dumping syndrome. That may be a problem. But the basic reason for not including liquids is to avoid fullness and that applies to everyone.