Eating before swimming okay

If you are of a certain vintage, you will recall a special torture parents put their children through in summer. On stifling days at the beach or pool, with cool water beckoning, mother after mother admonished impatient children: "It isn't an hour yet!"

Ah, the dreaded hour rule. Somewhere, someone deemed it unsafe to swim for an hour after eating. Even dabbling in shallow water risked a life-threatening cramp that could pull a child to a watery grave.

"My mother called me last week just to remind me," says Dr. Gord Sleivert, chuckling.

Sleivert is a physiologist and vice-president of sports performance at the Canadian Sport Centre Pacific, a training facility in Victoria for elite athletes. He says Olympic swimmers are encouraged to have a little food before they compete.

Their coaches have no fear that half a banana will result in race-ending cramps, Sleivert says.

Finding anyone who can tell you where the notion came from and how it became accepted wisdom is a challenge. Pinpointing why and when parents stopped enforcing the rule isn't easy either.

Neither the Canadian nor the American Red Cross, the Canadian YMCA nor the Lifesaving Society of Canada can do more than guess. The Red Cross societies insist they didn't stop promulgating the advice because, as far as they can tell, they never issued it in the first place.

Ian Fleming, archivist at the YMCA's Canadian head office, found a bit of evidence, in The Royal Life Saving Society Handbook of Instruction, published in 1936. "On no account bathe shortly after a hearty meal, when exhausted from vigorous exercise, when the body is cooling after perspiring..." it advises.

The presumption is that the rule was based on the idea that the stomach and limbs would compete for oxygen-rich blood.

Peter Wernicki, aquatics chair of the American Red Cross advisory council on first aid and safety, says some blood is shunted to the gut in digestion. "(But) any healthy person has plenty of blood and plenty of oxygen and they can do both," he says from Vero Beach, Fla.

"If you really are going to vigorously exercise – any exercise – eating a large meal beforehand is not a great idea," he adds. "It can make you uncomfortable. It might affect your performance somewhat. But it's not going to make you drown."