Random Thoughts -- Drinking with Dinner?

One of the things that was an oddity about my upbringing, was that my parents always frowned on drinking with dinner.  Anything even water, any meals I just chose dinner.  We didn't drink with meals.  Sometimes tea or water or diluted juice afterwards, and later in life this seemed to have been relaxed.  But the notion as I understood it was that you weren't supposed to wash your food down.

Whenever I went to a friend's house for dinner I was always asked what I wanted to drink.  Usually water or milk was offered, but occasionally soda too (that last one I think because I was a guest).  I would usually just decline as I didn't really like drinking milk.  To me most of their foods were more moist than I was used to anyway -- everything from salads with creamy dressing to white bread to breaded and fried fish vs. broiled.   

In my binging days, I probably consumed the most milk of any time in my life.  Outside the little cartons in grammar school, I've probably only truly drank a half dozen glasses of milk in my lifetime.  But in the binge days, how does one inhale a box of cookies?  Well, dunking in milk of course.  When I had pizza or fast food out with friends, I was already at an age where for some reason I had diet soda.  But one has to wonder how much more easily/faster that burger goes down the hatch when "washed" there with sips of anything in between.   Binge eating was almost always accompanied by drinking something -- usually diet soda or coffee.  Milk wasn't drank, it was used to soak ;-)  

I wonder how much of the overeating in general these days might be due to our national infatuation with drinking something all the time, both between meals and with.