Whether by choice or as a result of a change in circumstances, a third of us now regularly eat alone. Dietitian Juliette Kellow looks at the main diet scenarios and offers advice to make sure every single sitting is a healthy one
EATING ALONE is far from unusual. According to an ongoing study of more than 8,000 people by Sainsbury’s, 29% of UK adults dine alone most of the time. A national survey carried out by The Eden Project’s Big Lunch found similar results: 34% of people said they could go a whole week without eating with someone else.
WHY ARE WE EATING ON OUR OWN?
Unsurprisingly, these figures closely match the 29.5% of people in the UK who live alone. And this is a growing trend, too. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of single person households has increased by a fifth over the past 20 years, rising from 6.8 million in 1999 to 8.2 million in 2019.
But eating solo isn’t just a reality for people who live by themselves. Even if we live with other people, we can frequently end up having meals on our own. Research from The Big Lunch found adults typically eat 10 out of 21 meals alone each week, partly because differing schedules make it almost impossible to find a time when everyone can eat together. In fact, one in five people said their routines meant they ate evening meals at a different time from the others in their household. Lunchtime is even worse: more than half of those who worked said they rarely or never ate lunch with colleagues due to heavy workloads. The reality is that, for many of us, breakfast is eaten on the commute to work or once the children have been dropped at school; lunch is a sandwich eaten alone at our desk; and working late or having evening activities mean many family members eat dinner alone.
HOW HEALTHY IS IT?
Studies have been done to look at the impact this may have on our health. They suggest eating alone can certainly affect how much, what and when we eat. But whether it affects health and wellbeing positively or negatively seems to be largely dependent on whether we eat alone by choice or not. It’s also difficult to identify whether the impact on physical and mental health is specifically due to eating alone or down to other factors that may go hand in hand with eating alone, such as being lonely. It can also be difficult to identify whether dining alone may be caused by, or contributing to, health problems. For example, eating alone may make a person feel more depressed, but being depressed may mean
