Eating meals alone could make you unhappy: study

Eating by yourself can make you unhappy, a new study has found.

As part of Sainsbury’s Living Well Index, developed in partnership with Oxford Economics and the National Centre for Social Research, the retailer analysed the lifestyle of more than 8,000 British adults and found that eating meals alone can lead to unhappiness.

People who ate alone scored 7.9 points lower than the national average compared to those who ate in company, the survey found.

The study states: "While this analysis suggests that eating alone may be detrimental to people’s wellbeing, the barriers to sitting down to eat in groups more regularly are many and complex.

"For some, a failure to do so may be driven largely by social isolation and a lack of personal connections. For others, the key barrier could be bending time in their otherwise hectic lifestyles."

This finding highlight the importance of face-to-face contact.

Researchers found that social contacts such as talking to neighbours and meeting with friends were associated with higher happiness scores, while digital interactions showed no association at all.

“The quality of our relationships and spending time together physically, not digitally, can go a long way towards improving how well we’re living: nothing beats the power of simple human interaction,” Mike Coupe, group chief executive officer at Sainsbury’s, was quoted as saying by the Independent.

“Instead of adding to our day-to-day pressures with numerous digital interactions, we should make time to get together, eat together and share together.”

Previous research has raised concerns about eating alone affecting not just mental health of a person, but physical health as well. According to one study, men who ate alone at least twice a day were more likely to have metabolic syndrome — a cluster of risk factors including high blood pressure, high cholesterol and prediabetes.