A new study revealed that girls who regularly ate with their family are less likely to developing eating disorders or resort to extreme weight control measures.

The study, published in January issue of the international journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent, was based on surveying more than 2500 American high school students in 31 Minnesota schools in 1999. They were asked about their family meal habits, interactions, eating behaviors and body mass index. The students were followed up five years later, to see in what way their family meal habits influenced their future eating habits.

Researchers, led by Dianne Neumark-Sztainer at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health discovered that schoolgirls who ate five or more meals a week with their family had only two-thirds the chances of engaging in extreme weight control behavior such as diuretics, diet pills, laxatives or self-induced vomiting five years later.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, more than half of teenage girls and almost a third of teenage boys in the United States use unhealthy measures to control weight, such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting and taking laxatives. The association estimates that Americans spend more than $40 billion on dieting and diet products each year.

“Findings suggest that regular family meals during adolescence can play a protective role for extreme weight control behaviors in adolescent girls but not boys. It is important to help families find more ways to increase the frequency of family meals,” researchers said.

Health officials said that doctors should encourage families to have dinner at the table instead of on the couch in front of the television in order to protect against serious disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

“Clearly, if they're sitting with their family on a regular basis then their family can be more in control of their eating. It's about families and young people feeling connected within their family and that builds self-esteem and sense of worth and that works very actively against someone developing an eating disorder,” said Belinda Dalton, director of Melbourne-based eating disorders clinic The Oak House.

She also thinks that eating with the family helped normalize young people’s relationship with food.

The study also found that future eating habits of boys were not influenced by how often they participated in family meals.