Is drinking soup with meals good for the stomach?

Food is necessary to sustain people's lives, so everyone must eat every day. People in different places eat different foods every day. For example, people in the north like to eat noodles, while people in the south like to eat rice. In addition, people in some places like to drink soup with meals. Soup is rich in nutrients, and the nutrients are easily absorbed by the human body. So is it good for the stomach to drink soup with a meal?

It is generally believed that drinking soup while eating will dilute the digestive juices, making it impossible for food to be digested by gastric juice in time, which is not conducive to food digestion and nutrient absorption. In addition, liquid takes up volume and is excreted faster, which makes it easy to feel hungry after a meal. Moreover, if you drink a lot of soup and do not reduce your food intake, your stomach will become larger and larger, which can easily lead to obesity.

It is generally believed that you can drink a few sips of soup before a meal (but not too much, generally half a bowl of a medium-sized bowl is enough) to lubricate your mouth and esophagus. This can stimulate your appetite (calling the stomach to start working) and prevent dry and hard food from irritating the digestive tract mucosa, which is beneficial for diluting and stirring food and promoting digestion and absorption of food. In fact, drinking soup while eating is acceptable as long as the amount of soup is small.

Studies have shown that drinking a bowl of soup before a meal can help people absorb 100-190 kcal less energy. On the contrary, drinking soup after a meal is a way of eating that is detrimental to health. On the one hand, drinking soup after having eaten a full meal can easily lead to overnutrition and cause obesity; on the other hand, the soup drunk last will dilute the chyme that has been well mixed with digestive juices, affecting the digestion and absorption of food.

Experts point out that "drinking soup at lunch absorbs the least calories", so in order to prevent weight gain, you might as well choose to drink soup at noon. It is not advisable to drink too much soup for dinner, otherwise the quickly absorbed nutrients will accumulate in the body, which can easily lead to weight gain. It is best to choose low-fat foods for soup: To prevent gaining weight from drinking soup, you should try to use less high-fat, high-calorie foods for soup, such as old hens, fat ducks, etc. Even if you use them to make soup, it is best to skim off the excess fat during the stewing process. Lean meat, fresh fish, dried shrimp, skinless chicken or duck, rabbit meat, winter melon, loofah, radish, konjac, tomato, seaweed, kelp, mung bean sprouts, etc. are all good low-fat soup ingredients, so you might as well choose more of them.