Size does matter: The bigger the plate, the more we will fill it
How’s your diet plan working? Not so good, you say?
Take a tip from Brian Wansink. He heads Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, wrote the book “Mindless Eating” and studied how big plates make us fat. OK, it’s not the plate. But the bigger the plate, the more we fill it. Dinner-plate sizes have increased 36 percent since the ’60s, he said. And if you go from a 10-inch plate to a 12-inch plate, “the amount people serve themselves goes up about 22 percent.”
A 9-inch plate is better? Maybe not. “Sometimes people start realizing they’ve served themselves less and go back for seconds and thirds,” he said.
To find out the difference, we filled three plates (9-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch) with spaghetti, bottled sauce and frozen meatballs, then tallied calories.
Make picky eaters your ally, not enemy
They come in many forms, those wily picky eaters. There are the ones who draw lines across plates, and never two colors shall meet. There are those who refuse to put any color other than white in their sweet little mouths. And there are those who declare such doozies as, “If it’s Tuesday, I won’t eat anything but plain rice.”
It’s as if those little noggins dream up ways to confound the ones in charge of getting food to their plates. But therein, grown-ups, lies the secret: It’s your job to get healthful food onto plates; it’s a kid’s job to choose to eat it – or not. All the nudging, cajoling or flat-out threatening will not get the job done.
Restaurant calorie counts are complex calculations
We’re all one step closer to knowing what we’re eating – caloriewise – before we order it. And the restaurant industry is one step closer to knowing how it’s supposed to inform us of that.
But it may be the middle of 2012 before any of us finally sits down at Olive Garden, open the menu and see that the calamari appetizer we’re about to order contains 890 calories – not including a dipping sauce.
Requirements that restaurant chains with 20 or more units show calorie counts on regular menus, menu boards and drive-through menus were contained in Section 4205 of the 2010 health care reform law.
Step out of veggie doldrums
You mash potatoes with butter and chives, bathe broccoli florets in cheese sauce and stick plain butter on peas, carrots or corn. And greens? That’s bagged lettuce at your house.
Sounds like it’s time to get out of your vegetable rut and move beyond those basics.
You can up your veggie credentials by adding a couple new ones to your repertoire. Then stir in a few other cooking techniques, perhaps braising or roasting olive oil-rubbed vegetables in a piping hot oven until they’re tender and begin to caramelize.
Take a look at these vegetables – colorful, enticing, fresh. And check out the ways to prepare them in the corresponding copy. Hungry yet?
A.