Children only eat about 60 percent of the food they choose for themselves, which means the other 40 percent goes down the chute, an upcoming paper reports.
The Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University aggregated six studies involving 326 schoolchildren and found that, when their parents aren't watching, kids grab a lot more food than they wind up eating. Adults, meanwhile, eat more than 9o percent of the food they choose for themselves. Children, the paper concludes, do not yet know what they like or how much food it takes to fill them up.
"Yet to a loving, but frustrated parent who wants his/her non-cooperating children to be vegetable-eating members of the Clean Plate Club, there is good news in these results," said Brian Wansink, director of the lab. "They show that children who only eat half to two-thirds of the food they serve themselves aren't being wasteful, belligerent, or disrespectful. They are just being normal children.”
Wansink and Katherine Abowd Johnson will soon publish "Adults Only: Why Children Don't Belong in the Clean Plate Club" in the International Journal of Obesity. Earlier this year, the journal published an article by Wansink and another colleague that found that adults eat 91.7 percent of their food.
Wansink is the author of the 2006 landmark book "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think" and, two months ago, "Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life." He and his researchers are the folks who rigged up a soup bowl that slowly refilled as people ate it, via a tube under the table; people just kept on eating soup.
Wansink & Co. also determined that, in 52 paintings of the Last Supper, the amount of food on the plates steadily increases over time.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting that in "No More Clean Plate Club," the website healthychildren.org said, "There's absolutely no reason to provide pressure for children with normal development and health to eat. Don't reward hildren for finishing their dinner with more food (ie, dessert), as children will often eat past their fullness. New research also finds that using smaller plates can help control portion sizes and ultimately will reduce the number of calories eaten."
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