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Drinking water with a meal may actually make you eat more, according to a new study.
To test whether drinking habits during a meal affect how much food people eat, researchers from Cornell University in New York and Penn State University in Pennsylvania combined data from two experiments involving 86 adults.
The participants ate as much as they wanted of either beef chilli or chicken tikka masala along with water and were filmed so researchers could measure how much water they drank.
The number of sips they took, their sip size, drinking speed and how often they alternated between bites of food and sips of water were also monitored.
The study, published in the journal Appetite, found people who drank more water ate more food, not less, and people who switched more often between food and water also ate more.
For every extra 100g of water participants drank, they ate 39 more grams of food, which equates to about 49 more calories.
People who frequently switched between bites of food and sips of water ate more: each additional switch was tied to about 4.4 more grams of food consumed.
Researchers suspect this ‘switching’ effect works by delaying something called sensory-specific satiety – the way a food’s appeal naturally fades the longer you eat it.
Drinking water with a meal may actually make you more hungry, new research has found (File image)
Alternating with water may reintroduce contrast that keeps the meal appealing longer, delaying the point at which people stop eating.
Dr Paige Cunningham, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University and the paper’s lead author, said: ‘There’s been this widespread advice that if we drink water it fills us up, but water is emptied quickly from the stomach so it likely doesn’t fill us up for long.
‘Instead, water may increase how much we eat, providing lubrication, which can speed up eating, and preventing a dry mouth, which can prolong enjoyment of the food.’
The authors noted that the relatively small scale of the study means that the findings can’t be applied to all meals or eating situations, however.
