We start from the traditional basis that we all know: after meals, you have to wait two hours before you can swim in the pool or on the beach. Well then, an expert consulted by RAC1 maintains and justifies that this is “a typically Spanish myth”.
The pediatrician and writer Carlos González assures that “this recommendation, which has even been given by the Generalitat and the Red Cross, cannot be found in any reliable English or French source.”
“Every summer it’s on the news that someone has died from a digestive cut,” says the doctor. “No, forgive me: they have drowned. And the parents keep in mind that they have to wait two hours, but they are not reminded that they have to keep an eye on the children all the time, that it is dangerous to get into the water if you have drunk alcohol, there is no law that obliges private swimming pools to be surrounded by a security fence…”
Carlos González attributes drowning on the beach and in the pool to any other reason, but not to the fact that he was digesting or to a sudden change in temperature. “There are many countries that do the Christmas Day swim, when the water is extremely cold,” he reasons. “It’s also customary in the Nordic countries to get out of the sauna, into ice water and back into the sauna, and nothing happens.”
González assures that the foundation of this tradition is the insistence of Spanish mothers throughout the decades, which has even come to influence the medical profession.
“They have insisted so much on this two-hour thing that some doctors, when they see that in six years of their career no one has told them about this -because it is not true-, they try to justify what they had heard in some way,” says the pediatrician. “And they’re convinced that ‘there must be something because everyone says so’.”
The specialist adds that, when the news of a death due to a digestion cut appears in the media, “they always manage to interview a serious doctor who corroborates it.”
González puts on the table that things happen to people, whether or not they are in the water. Many drownings occur because something has happened to them that has prevented them from coming to the surface, whether they have eaten or not.
“If people get into water at random, at any time of the day, since we eat at least three times a day, it is very easy for someone to get into the water within two hours after eating a meal and drown,” he reasons. “It’s pure chance. If you eat three times a day, there are six hours a day that are ‘the two hours after eating’. It is impossible for anyone not to drown during these hours.”
In any case, however, there is no study that confirms the relationship between having eaten and drowning. Therefore, the slogan is that both children and adults can bathe after eating, but respecting safety measures and common sense, whatever the time.
“If parents have the habit of taking a nap after eating, while you’re sleeping, don’t let your child go to the pool, that’s really dangerous,” he says. “You have to watch a lot, even if the child knows how to swim.”
