French people eat until they're full, Americans eat until the food's gone
More research in the ongoing struggle to understand why French people are skinnier than Americans, despite the chocolate, wine, cheese, pastry and pate: Cornell researchers say it's down to the different cues that French people and Americans use to tell them when to stop eating. The French stop when they're full, Americans stop when the plate is empty (or the TV show ends).
"Furthermore, we have found that the heavier a person is -- French or American -- the more they rely on external cues to tell them to stop eating and the less they rely on whether they felt full," said senior author Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in the Department of Applied Economics and Management, now on leave to serve as executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion until January 2009.Link
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I think it's the guilt parents put into their kids when their young. About Africa.
"Finish what is on your plate. There's starving children in Africa that would love to eat that."
I've heard lots of parents say that. My mom said that to me when I was younger.
Also: "You are lucky you live in America and we can afford food like this." If there was something i particularly didn't like.
I still feel guilty today if I don't finish the food that's on my plate. I really think that there is a culture of guilt in America. At certain levels at least.
I blame my dad: He would only take us to All-You-Can-Eat diners, and would say "I paid $__.__ for your meal, so you better eat at least that much worth of food."
PS:I've found if I'm not paying attention when I go out to a buffet, I can end up spending 2+ hours eating. How can you tell that your finished, when there's still more food you could eat?
I've had similar experiences as 1 and 2, but in both cases that started making me take smaller portions. That way it's easier to clean my plate (1) and my plate count is higher, seeming like I ate more than I did (2). So I sort of worked it to help me, but I could see it being a guilt that would stick with you.
What should be taught to children is mindfulness.
Here is the food. Where did it come from? Who's work, what animal's sacrifice, what plants that need somewhere to grow? How did it get here? How was it prepared? What does it do for you? What food can you live without? What food means life itself?
Just part of the eternal parenting job.
At restaurants, when I get the entree, I usually bisect it ... half to one side of the plate, half to the other.
I eat one half, treating the other as "not my food".
When I'm done, I immediately ask the waitrix to wrap up the rest to go ... otherwise it's too tempting (especially if others at the table are still eating).
Bonuses: fewer calories, leftovers for tomorrow, and room for dessert!
This "Eat it all to help the starving" actually goes way back in the US.
Recently I reviewed some US propaganda (actual WWI and WWII US-gov't produced propaganda - when such was still legal) and was amazed at how much of the World War One stuff was directed at publicizing the starvation/food shortages of France and Belgium. These were produced by "The Food Administration" a precursor to the FDA. Perhaps getting public sympathy for the deployment of Woodrow Wilson's guns to Europe.
The point is these posters from 1917 specifically told people to clear their plates to save food for the starving in Europe. They also urged less consumption of sugar in the US to free up ships to send food to Europe.
Americans clear their plates? A "social echo" of the propaganda from 1917?
Off-topic I was surprised by the "Recycle-reduce use" posters from WWII. They recycled everything that we do, with the addition of kitchen fats, collected for munition manufacture.
Can it be that our recycling programs are in aid of the current war effort? If its for the environment ok, but if its to help the killing machine rumble on...
I agree with the posters who say a lot of us are simply trained to eat all the food on our plates as kids. As a child I was considered rude by a few of my friends' parents because I would only eat until I was full enough!
Mostly I think kids need to be taught to fill their own plate, taking a small portion and "seconds" if they are really still hungry.
And to spend all day running around outdoors, of course.
There is no real mystery to the different diets.
Having traveled extensively in France the main difference in food consumption that I have noticed is that the opportunity to buy high-fat, high calorie snack items are relativly rare there.
Everyone talks about pate and brie but in reality these items are more likely eaten at dinner not as a between meal snack.
Availability of unhealthy food options on EVERY corner in America is the main culprit in the fattening of America.
Anytime one is peckish in the USA there is always an 800 calorie, $2.00 menu item available that can be SUPER-SIZED for a nominal charge..
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It turns out, most of what Mom told you was WRONG!!!
HA!
:D
The study is a self report questionnaire given to under 300 people. There are many other factors - such has how cultures want to perceive themselves - at play here, which may influence the results outside of how people actually eat. I haven't read the study yet, but my guess is that it's sorely lacking in terms of actual merit or any form of objective evidence.
Most research into obesity is, sadly, really poorly done.
For more information on obesity studies, read www.junkfoodscience.com
I'm especially encouraging Cory to read that site before he posts another annoying rant on obesity.
The half-plate method works out pretty well for me, and sometimes things are actually better the second day, after whatever spices they put on it have another chance to mingle. This does pre-suppose the discipline to carry through with the plan, but that part is working out pretty well, too.
The half-plate method also saves money, since the lesser-portions served at certain crap-nailed-to-the-walls (even if they are in a state of post-crap) will charge more than half the price for the smaller portion.
Also, the proper term is clearly waitron.
#2: Ugh, what a errible thing for your father to say. Buffets are terrible. I recall traveling on business to a podunk town somewhere with a really bad all you can eat breakfast buffet. I found something halfway decent off the menu while fat slob locals waddled by with a literal mountain of powdered scrambled eggs, extra greasy bacon and sausage, biscuits...awful...it looked like the kind of deliberately over-piled plate an artist might conjure up to make a commentary on American gluttony.
#4: Right on target!! I am impressed, Takuan...have you read Thich Nhat Hanh's books? TNH has more gratitude and appreciation for the earth and everyone and everything on it one of his fingernails that the typical fat bloated self-absorbed slob has in his entire blob of a body.
#5: Great idea!
One other point: McDonalds realized that Americans keep eating until the food is gone...just like dogs. Hence the whole Super Size glutton specials on their menu...until the terrific Super Size Me documentary embarrassed Mickey D's to the point where Super Sizing, AFAIK, is off the menu.
(I say AFAIK as I don't know for sure, because I have eaten at a McD's once that I can remember in the last 15+ years, and I still remember how I felt like crap afterwards!)
Just treat the Children in Africa dilemna like this: sure, those children could use those calories, but if you eat that excess food, it's still not gonna help anyone, but it WILL harm you, and you're going to have to expend more shoe rubber and energy from the gym's water pumps in order to burn that excess food energy.
If the French are really as good at eating in moderation as their rep says they are, they've had to overcome a lot of genetic programming to get there. Human beings are hardwired to eat beyond the point of satiation, and with good reason. In the state of nature there was never certainty of a steady food supply, so it was essential to gorge when you could against the inevitable times when you wouldn't be able to. Modern humans have been called "hunter-gatherers at the all-you-can-eat buffet" and that an apt description. Americans make it decidedly worse with our growing habit of serving and consuming far larger portions than in the past. The answer is to push away from the table and take a moment before finishing a heaping plate of food--and certainly before ordering seconds. Your brain eventually catches up with your digestive system, but it takes time.
As I view this post via Google Reader there is an advertisement for Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches attached to the bottom that reads:
"Sure there are things in your freezer with fewer calories, ice comes to mind."
Also, in regards to #5, technically the etiquette-minded thing to do is have boxed up what you think you can't eat before you begin eating, and anything left on your plate is to be thrown out. I've been trying this recently and it's great, I don't feel too full, and I've saved a good-sized portion that can be tomorrow's lunch.
My mother always told me to eat less. It just made me more neurotic, so I shoveled in as much as I could. I wore Huskies.
It's not only the French. It's the Italians, Germans, Spanish, ... almost every culture in Europe, who eat until they are full, with reasonable portions of food, and only at mealtime with little or no snacking between meals.
I never got the logic that eating everything on your plate will somehow help starving children. It must have started either as a message to be grateful for what you have, and to show it by not letting it go to waste; or the idea that it's better for people to buy less food and then eat it all, than buy too much and only eat some of it (and over time the nuance of that got lost). Either way, I do have a problem with waste. The trick is to take small portions, and put the leftovers in the fridge for lunch!
I can vouch for Americans here. Beer, gone. Way past full.
Well, it's all well and good for the French, but what about the British? I had a dozen British people from London to Manchester stay with me in the last 15 years and saw a very different reaction. Food, for the first time in their lives, was cheaply available- fruit and vegetables were easily half of what they told me they'd normally pay. Beef was similar- they were used to fish and organ meats, not cheap steaks. Most of them overate and complained about the effect of American food, but I still think it was the cheap cost and variety that did them in. I learned that a great first day trip to a Wegmans or Trader Joes was better than a museum.
I have one good Bavarian friend and he claims he barely eats when he goes back home because the variety of food just isn't there (heavy sausages, cabbage and beer).
I knew one French Swiss woman and when she grew up her school lunch consisted of a section of french bread, an apple or pear, cheese and water. That was it. No meat. No vegetables. Her lunches most days of the week were two cigarettes and a cup of coffee on a park bench. Sometimes she'd have bread and cheese. I'm not sure that's really healthy even if she was thin.
I'm a vegetarian and she never ate what I'd consider a balanced meal of beans, rice and green vegetables. But she was only culturally French.
You mean the French? The reason they don't eat much is their waiters refuse to tell even the locals what the menu means. They just roll their eyes, and keep odd hours, like "Sorry, cannot serve you now" since we are not open, even though we seated you. The French are starving.
Actually, it's about fat. That's the point. But I wont go there, just give homework to avid fans of being smart and sexy: Books.
"Good Calories/Bad Calories"
"Protein Power"
Turns out, steak and eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner makes you SKINNY. I didn't know. Now I do. Nerd alert. Get chicks by being skinnier, and better informed.
Look at the situation. Food pyramid. Both in the 70's, now the 10's, both PYRAMIDS say "PIG OUT ON PASTA AND BREAD." Guess what, fatty? That's why you be fat. It's not your fault.
Darth Vader = Ancil Keys. Scientific specialization allowed JUNK science to convince everybody to eat pasta and bread (and cereal), all day.
Can you say three million deaths from diabetes a year. That's blood on someone's hands? Who? Read the books and find out.
It's like a Dr. Bronner's label.
Wow -- all those comments and not a single person who noted that The French paradox is probably a myth. The French have serious obesity and heart disease problems:
See:
http://www.marininstitute.org/alcohol_policy/french_drinking.htm
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/20/the_skinny/main3280714.shtml
hello!i'm parisian and my english is shitty but i understand and i think that's just a trouble of junk food,in france we have got a lot of macdonalds too but french people love kooking,and menu in macdonalds are very very smaller than united states.Perhaps that is just custom and in french people love their image,there are a culture of narcissisme.In the street we have a lot of big posters for commercial with women very thin sometimes just with a string.And never we will see a big woman.Even in the magasine.and in same times in the country we have an obesity inflation,because food this is not the same customs,sometimes they havn't got a lot of money or they havn't got time for koocking then they go to the junkfood or buy bad food.well in paris i don't see a lot of obése,i see a lot of pro-ana.
And yep i'm agree in france we drink very much and very young we begin,that is normal in france to have 15 years and to be drink stoned.That is usual.And we smoke marijuana too much too.Even our president.France is like amy winehouse.^^
And young girl would like to look like kate moss then there are a lot of anorexic.
Win!
Hey Julie!
Your website is way cool!
aaah thanks amigo!!!!;)
and when i was in florida two months ago i win 7 kilo,that's crazy.I think american people love friture oil.disgusting.:)
I think this goes further than a plate of food, I myself have trouble stopping anything I'm doing much less eating, for me even something hard has to be finished in a timely manner. For example the other day I was power washing my driveway and had to take my little boy to ball practice, instead of feeling happy I was getting a break, I had to make myself quit. Here I was doing something not even enjoyable and I had to make myself quit to go and do something that enjoy quite a lot. Of course the idea of finishing what you start is usually a good trait to have, but not so in this case. I also remember being bragged on as a child because I could eat so much, but my wife's family would call you a pig if they would have seen me eat that much. I'm not sure what matters the most, but I can guarantee you that it all matters some.
Americans mostly eat to stimulate their emotions, whilst most other cultures eat to extend their lifespan. Also, Americans eat very little green vegetables, and if they do, they are cooked to death, covered in a dairy product, and considered an 'optional' side to a giant portion of starch and meat. I consider this type of eating, a grand design to mass suicide, considering we have no unified heritage to keep us on track. Also, this type of diet invites toxic organisms to invade the body, taking control of the eating habits, producing neurotoxins which hijack hormones, and leading to premature death.
I am German, grew up in France, lived in America and now I live in Italy and have two things to say.
1. the Keyword is: reasonable portions and not between meals
2. From the youngest age on... parents need to show children what they eat. They need to know what an eggplant or leeks look like. The prefabricated food is the worst and children have no clue where everything comes from... where the nutrients that create their bodies grow...
Parents, get your act together an cook for you children, with your children and for your children.