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Adults only: why don’t children belong to the clean-plate club?

International Journal of Obesity volume 39, page 375 (2015)Cite this article

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What percentage of the food you serve do you eat? If we could provide estimates of how much food people took they actually ate, this would open the door for a huge number of studies in psychology, marketing, economics and consumer behavior that have been dismissed or overlooked by nutrition and public health because they measured how much subjects served, but not how much they ate. Providing this ‘percent eaten’ estimate was the objective of Wansink and Johnson.1 After aggregating results from a wide number of self-served meals and snacks, one conclusion was that most adults are members of the clean-plate club. Regardless of their sex or ethnicity, it was estimated the average adult in these studies ate ~92% (unweighted by sample size) of what they served.

In a thoughtful critique of this figure, Robinson et al.2 raise excellent points that suggest this 92% figure is an upper bound and perhaps even an overestimate of the actual percentage of self-served food a person consumes. One of their points is that many of these studies were lab-based studies, where people knew they were being observed and may have acted differently in real life—perhaps serving more and eating less of it with the variation of plate size3, 4 or perhaps by being less self-conscious about serving a second or third helping.

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References

  1. Wansink B, Johnson KA . The clean plate club: about 92% of self served food is eaten. Int J Obes 2014. e-pub ahead of print 20 June 2014; doi:10.1038/ijo.2014.104.

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  2. Robinson E, Nolan S, Tudur-Smith C, Boyland EJ, Harrold JA, Halford JC . The not so clean plate club: food self-served won’t always result in food eaten. Int J Obes 2014. e-pub ahead of print 10 November 2014; doi:10.1038/ijo.2014.197.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Food and Brand Lab, Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA,

    B Wansink

  2. Department of Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

    K A Johnson

Authors
  1. B Wansink
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  2. K A Johnson
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Correspondence to B Wansink.

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Wansink, B., Johnson, K. Adults only: why don’t children belong to the clean-plate club?. Int J Obes 39, 375 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2014.205

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