Nothing Bad Will Happen If You Swim Right After Your Meal.
Until I was asked about this yesterday, I completely forgot about the childish ritual of sitting and whining by the pool after eating. Do you really need to keep kids out of the water for an hour? Is half an hour normal? Ten minutes? Friends, do what you want. There has never been a health or safety reason for this rule.
Food won’t cause stomach cramps, and cramps won’t kill
I have tried to trace the origins of this rule, and while I could not find a definitive answer, there was certainly a widespread belief, dating back at least a century ago, that eating before swimming causes fatal stomach cramps. In her book How to Swim , published in 1918, Annette Kellermann wrote:
At least two hours should elapse between eating and being immersed in water to give the digestive processes time to work properly. If it is introduced into water too quickly after eating, especially at low temperatures, the digestion process stops immediately, which in itself can cause severe cramps and possibly lead to acute indigestion, which can be serious. …
Subsequent studies have not been able to confirm this, and in fact swimmers eat before and even during long-distance swims. It may be uncomfortable for you to eat a large meal before an energetic swim, but you will not do this before you go for a run.
You can get cramps from any exercise, usually in the arms and legs. A 1950 study on seizures in swimmers included this gem:
As an interesting addition, we made it a practice in all of our lessons to ask if any of the students had ever had stomach cramps while swimming. To date, after interviewing more than 10,000 boys, we have not come across a single person who has had it, or a person who claims to have actually seen it. …This is amazing; to put it mildly, due to the large number of drowning, presumably caused by stomach cramps. … It seems likely that we are mindlessly perpetuating the invention of newspaper writers, which is nothing more than an idea coined by untrained observers and based on the most far-fetched evidence.
My accent. Blame the newspaper writers if necessary, but modern science agrees: there is no reason to believe that food intake increases the risk of drowning or other risks associated with swimming.
If you’re going to make a rule, make it good.
Some people assume it’s convenient to keep the kids out of the water so the parents can rest, but I’d rather just lie in the chair and let the kids swim than say no, not a hundred times.
(One member of the Facebook group Offspring mentioned that they like to keep kids waiting for half an hour for poop reasons – change diapers before they come back. But I would say the rule is outdated by the time your kids are old enough. to dry your asses.)
I’ve heard that there are other reasons why parents talk, but most of us are pretty indifferent about it. “Oh, does your friend have to wait half an hour? Okay, you can come back when they do. But let me suggest a change: if you really want to keep kids out of the water, feel free to come up with one very specific rule: sharks, for example. Oh look, they’re gone.
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