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Healthy foods help the heart. So do healthy relationships.
Today’s young couples seem to find it far more romantic and fun to cook together and enjoy eating in each other’s company. They seem to prefer the cozy comfort of their homes for having shared meals, perhaps even more than going to fine restaurants.
The cooking they seem to love to do together is not just the “heat-up and eat-up” kind either. Many couples seem to love experimenting with dishes they’ve never tried before, spurred by the countless couples cooking recipe videos online.
Not only is joint cooking a pleasure for young pairs, but the whole mood sets in right from shopping for groceries together … to deciding who does what … to being each other’s taste-testers … and then turning out delicious dishes they can eat off his-n-hers matching plates, while watching favorite shows together. (And yes, washing up after dinner is a spot of shared time too!)
Experts believe that by learning to work together in the kitchen, life partners could gain some valuable relationship skills. This could go a long way towards building both happiness and health. Let’s check out more on this fascinating subject!
There seems to be much new scientific truth now that justifies the old saying, “Couples who cook together stay together.” We’ve just looked at two interesting studies and found these insights below.
According to Fox News, the insights from this research include:
According to SWNS Digital (of the SWNS Media Group), here’s what the results of this study were:
According to Ellie Nan Storck, writing in the Brides Magazine and quoting Jaime Bronstein, a licensed relationship therapist: “When a couple does activities together within their home, it strengthens their bond. They say home is where the heart is. When you’ve found your person, you feel like they are ‘home,’ therefore spending time together at home can only help a couple thrive.”
Also, cooking together helps couples in all these different ways:
No matter what the signs of caring between couples are, finding common ground with food is another dimension to expressing mutual feelings. Whether one or more of the partners is good at cooking or not, just doing something for the person you love is one of the best ways to show appreciation.
As a society, we are so occupied with relationship break-up issues that we don’t see daily opportunities to work together as a team as little bridges that focus on “staying together.” Couples can learn to see themselves as teams instead of as individuals through joint cooking.
In cooking, there is much to decide on who does what – depending not just on what they are good at but also on what they like to do (even if they are not very good at it). This give and take of “cooking territory” teaches couples how to mutually allow each other to go with their mojo in other aspects of their lives.
Two strong medical reasons support the idea of home cooking by couples.
According to medical science, food aroma is more closely linked to emotion and memory than any other sense. This is due to the proximity between the olfactory nerve (the one for smelling) and the amygdala and hippocampus, two parts of your brain intensely concerned with emotion and memory.
Also, according to Crystal Raypole, writing in Heathline, cooking and romance are both connected … because the reward hormones you experience from loving or being loved and satisfying hunger by eating are the same (i.e., dopamine and norepinephrine).
If one or both partners have any chronic health conditions such as obesity, cholesterol, diabetes, and hypertension, a lot of mutual caregiving will be necessary. When these ailments combine with other hereditary factors, they can all have a multiplicative effect on the heart.
Get a dietician’s advice on foods to avoid when having high blood sugar, the best diet to prepare to lower cholesterol, and the ingredients to use that can control high blood pressure. Cooking together at home more often will also stop that vicious cycle of junk food and obesity. By planning your diet meals to make together, you can show how much you care for each other’s health and well-being.
According to Hayley Small, writing in Your Tango, there are many ideas for extending the benefits of cooking together as homely pairs. We’ve been inspired by some of her suggestions and added our own:
You won’t produce anything at all if both want to get their hands into every cooking process. Divide jobs and delegate. Respect each other’s territory and process. If you must, take turns at being the head chef and the sous chef.
Discover how walking down supermarket aisles can be as delightful as a walk in the park on a moonlit night. Have a budget divided into two. The idea is not to pile the shopping cart with everything each of the partners fancies.
Yes, everything can get done twice as fast when working with a partner. But that doesn’t mean you have to rush with the dinner-making together. Take it slow. Enjoy the process. Find reasons to make couple cooking feel like a wafting melody instead of an insistent drumbeat.
Pots will get burnt, the mixer-grinder’s lid will come off mid-action and splash the contents on the walls, or the food will be half-eaten just by the amount of taste-testing couples may do, one after the other. It’s all a flavor of real life that can be as wholesome as things going perfectly.
Add some rice to the dhals both of you love, and add all the vegetables and spices you both want. Cook till you get that heartwarming khichdi that we Indians love as “comfort food”. It may turn out differently each time you both make it … but can any twosomes go wrong with this one-pot dish?
Cooking as a team can not only produce delightful dishes, it can also cement the bonds of love, happiness, and shared memories for any couple. Enjoy the double satisfaction of cooking together. Stay heart-healthy. Be a Zinda Dil.
