Eat Until Food Is Finished Or TV-Show Is Over?
It’s the French paradox redux: Why don’t the French get as fat as Americans, considering all the baguettes, wine, cheese, paté and pastries they eat?
Because they use internal cues — such as no longer feeling hungry — to stop eating, tells Wansink reporting a new Cornell study. Americans, on the other hand, tend to use external cues — such as whether their plate is clean, they have run out of their beverage or the TV show they’re watching is over.”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.The new study, an analysis of questionnaires from 133 Parisians and 145 Chicagoans about how they decide when to stop eating, is being published in the journal Obesity and is being presented this later month at an the Winter Marketing Educators conference.”Over-relying on external cues to stop eating a meal may prove useful in offering a partial explanation of why body mass index [a calculation based on the relationship of weight to height] varies across people and potentially across cultures,” said co-author Collin Payne, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher. He stressed that further studies should following up with smoking behavior and socio-economic differences as well. “Relying on internal cues for meal cessation, rather than on external cues, may improve eating patterns in the long term. But things are not as easy. This internality or externality of eating cues seems to have oposing effects on bodyweight, depending on where the focus of research rests (see below). The quoted study finds that dieters who have the tendency to eat in response to external factors, such as at festive celebrations, have fewer problems with their weight loss than those who eat in response to emotions (internal factors). Led by researchers at The Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center, the study also found that emotional eating was associated with weight regain in successful losers. So eating due to external factors and stopping meal in response to internal cues seems the right thing to do. But mind, not being hungry is the only benefic internal cue to stop eating. Who eats in response to emotional problems might well react to internal stimuli, but will be highly unlikely to keep a healthy energy-uptake with his eating habits.
