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Life / Health & Wellness / Fitness
Dish size, meal frequency may affect kids’weight, studies findShrinking the size of kids’ plates and bowls and encouraging them to eat morefrequently might help them eat less, new research suggests.
DREAMSTIME
In one study, researchers found first graders served themselves smaller portions when usingminiaturized dishware — and ate less food when they had less on their plate.
By: Reuters, Published on Tue Apr 09 2013
NEW YORK — Shrinking the size of kids’ plates and bowls and encouraging them to eatmore frequently throughout the day might help them eat less and keep off extra weight,new research suggests.
In one study, researchers found first graders served themselves smaller portions whenusing miniaturized dishware — and ate less food when they had less on their plate.
Another review of past research found kids and teens who ate most often during the daywere 22 per cent less likely to be overweight than those who ate the fewest meals andsnacks.
Jennifer Fisher, who worked on the dishsize study, said it was preliminary but couldstill inform parent choices.
“For now, certainly it seems like something parents can easily incorporate into theirdaily lives without a lot of work and effort,” Fisher, from Temple University inPhiladelphia, said.
She and her colleagues studied 42 elementary school kids who were given the chance toserve themselves lunch. On four days the kids used childsized plates and bowls; onanother four they used adultsized dishware, which was twice as large.
First graders served themselves an average of 300 to 500 calories worth of the lunchentrée — pasta or chicken nuggets — each day.
When they used adult dishware, the kids took an average of 90 more calories of food,the researchers found. And kids who ended up with more food on their plates alsotended to eat more, Fisher’s team wrote Monday in Pediatrics.
“It doesn’t appear that simply because you might have large dishware at home, yourchild is going to overeat,” said Fisher — because it depends on who’s doing the servingand how much is served.
But, she added, “If more food appears on the plate, they’re going to eat more.”
“The results are very interesting and confirm our expectations that the impact of platesize on adults in the laboratory also apply to children,” Dr. Thomas Robinson, achildhood obesity researcher at Stanford University in California, said in an email.
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“This study provides very important preliminary evidence that using smaller dishwaremay help reduce children’s energy intakes.”
For their own analysis, researchers from Harokopio University in Athens, Greece,looked at 11 studies, mostly conducted in the Mediterranean, that compared eatingfrequency and weight in close to 19,000 kids and teens.
The overall pattern showed that youth who ate most often — typically at least four orfive times per day — were least likely to be overweight or obese. However when theylooked closer, the researchers found that link only held up in boys.
Robinson, who was not involved in the new research, said it’s hard to tell which camefirst in those studies: eating frequency or extra weight.
The results “do not look very convincing one way or another,” he said. “It is also hard tocome up with a convincing reason why boys and girls would be different.”
The researchers said their findings don’t prove that a given child will lose weight byeating more often. But schools, for example, may be able to make a difference byintegrating smaller, more frequent meals into the day.
“Instead of providing three big meals per day, it would be better (for parents) to havetheir children eating smaller meals and more snacks throughout the day,” coauthorMary Yannakoulia said in an email.
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