A major global study suggests that eating with others may be a simple, measurable sign of stronger social connections and better well-being, but rising rates of eating alone in the United States are raising new concerns about everyday isolation.
Research: Sharing meals can improve your sense of well-being. Image credit: BrightGridVisuals / Shutterstock
Large-scale global study published in journal scientific report It suggests that something as simple as sharing a meal can play a powerful role in well-being.
Researchers found that the frequency of eating with others, an indicator of social connectedness, was associated with improved well-being and had similar predictive power as key socio-economic indicators such as income and unemployment.
The study, based on global survey data and daily time use and well-being data from the United States over the past week, shows that while sharing meals is associated with higher happiness and lower stress, eating alone, an increasingly common trend in the United States, especially among young people, is correlated with lower happiness.
Social connections support health, happiness, and prosperity, and shape outcomes ranging from psychological well-being to longevity.
People who maintain strong social connections report higher life satisfaction, lower stress, and lower risk of disease, while exhibiting higher levels of trust, cooperation, and civic engagement.
In contrast, loneliness and isolation are associated with poorer health, shorter lifespans, and negative social outcomes.
Recent research suggests that sharing meals may be a simple and meaningful pathway to strengthening these connections, with research linking shared meals to improved nutrition, improved mood, and reduced symptoms of depression.
However, despite its near-universal nature, the relationship between social eating patterns and well-being remains surprisingly unexplored.
Life expectancy rating by number of meals shared in the past week Gallup World Poll, 2022-2023
Research design on shared global and U.S. meals.
In the new study, researchers combined global and national datasets to examine the link between eating with others and happiness. They analyzed data from the 2022-2023 Gallup World Poll (GWP), which surveyed more than 150,000 respondents in 142 countries and territories.
Participants reported the number of days they shared lunch or dinner with an acquaintance in the previous week.
To understand long-term trends in the United States (US), the team also used the 2003-2023 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which surveyed more than 239,000 respondents, and the Well-being Module, which collected emotional experiences from more than 25,000 participants using day reconstruction techniques.
The researchers applied a linear regression model to examine the association between shared meals, life evaluations, and both positive and negative emotional states.
They controlled for demographic and socioeconomic variables such as age, gender, education, income, employment type, and household size, along with country fixed effects in the global analysis and county fixed effects in the US analysis.
Additional models used interaction terms to examine variation among different household compositions.
In the U.S. sample, the team compared people who ate all meals alone to people who shared at least one meal and estimated differences in well-being using weighted analysis to ensure representativeness of the population.
They also examined subgroup variation by marital status, employment, and remote work patterns. A series of robustness checks confirmed the consistency of the results, with most analyzes conducted using ordinary least squares regression.
Shared meals and happy outcomes
This analysis revealed a significant positive association between food sharing and well-being in nearly all regions of the world.
On average, sharing one extra meal a week increased happiness by 0.2 points on a scale of 0 to 10. This effect is comparable to the well-being cost of a 1.5 percentage point increase in inflation.
What’s notable is that even sharing just one meal made a difference. Those who shared at least one meal reported a better overall life evaluation than those who reported not sharing a meal (5.2 vs. 4.9), and the difference was about half the size of the loss in well-being associated with unemployment.
These associations remain robust even when controlling for education, income, and employment, and meal sharing explains as much variation in well-being as key socio-economic indicators. This pattern held across age and gender groups and extended across both favorable and unfavorable emotional states.
Globally, Latin America reports the highest frequency of eating with others, while South and East Asia show lower levels.
The strength of this relationship was particularly pronounced in Australia, New Zealand, and North America, but the regional pattern was neither completely linear nor uniform.
Trends in eating alone in the United States
In the United States, a 20-year trend has seen a marked increase in the number of people eating alone, with 26% of adults reporting eating alone at every meal by 2023, an increase of more than 50% since 2003. People who primarily eat alone have about a half-point lower life evaluation, report lower happiness, and higher levels of stress, pain, and sadness than those who eat with others.
Older people had higher absolute rates of eating alone, but younger people showed the steepest increase over time.
The findings highlight the strong and consistent association between social eating and well-being and suggest that even modest increases in shared eating can have meaningful benefits at both the individual and collective levels.
Sharing food as a well-being strategy
Taken together, these findings position shared meals as a simple and scalable means to support well-being at both individual and societal levels. Sharing a meal is a universal and easily measured behavior, making it a practical proxy for social connectedness and a potential target for intervention for researchers and policy makers.
The rapid rise in solo eating, especially among young adults in the United States, highlights the urgent need for deeper investigation into its root causes and long-term effects.
Future research should go beyond associations to investigate causal pathways that include the role of interaction quality, work patterns, and cultural background. If confirmed, promoting co-eating could be a low-cost and viable strategy to strengthen social bonds and improve people’s well-being.
