It amazes me what people will waste money to "find out". I love reading about these scientific studies. I recently saw a report on the news that said violent video games can have a detrimental effect on people who have violent personalities.

Though my favorite one was that before they started marketing the tagless T, Hanes did research for over a year to come to the conclusion that most men remove the tags from their undershirts because they find them irritating.

Well I'm surprised by this result, because it contradicts my personal experiences in restaurants, which is that it is very common to not eat everything, if you feel full, even though it tasted great. Though usually that is followed by an apology to the waiter to tell the cook it wasn't a problem with the food. So I find it weird that people would eat everything, no matter how much, and have no actual awareness of being not hungry anymore.

Ah, but this study was for Americans, who are trained to clean their plates. Personally, I have been known to leave things over, even when I serve myself. I'm a grazer. I just graze *alot*.

Yeah; there's a weird cultural emphasis on "clean your plate" here. (And yes, Franziska, that's the phrase we use.) My parents didn't use it, but it's in enough literature and on television that it took quite a while to train myself out of doing it at restaurants (at home, I just give myself less food, and then I'm not upset by leaving some on the plate - I eat it all, but it's not a huge amount).

I think once that was the common attitude here too, but it hasn't been for a while. Like parents used to tell their little kids it would rain if they didn't clean their plate... I mean, nowadays even my dad leaves food on the plate in restaurants if he's satisfied, and he used to give lectures about throwing away food and how we shouldn't grumble about three-day left-over soup when I was little (my parents didn't have a freezer then, so freezing leftovers wasn't an option). In restaurants it is still a bit more polite to eat everything (hence the apology thing if you don't), but it's not a big deal.

There was a well-known study taught in introductory psych courses when I was an undergrad (early 80's). It compared 'normal'-weight and overweight people. Subjects were brought into a room at their normal mealtime, hungry, and served a plate of sandwiches each (the study varied how large the plateful was). They were told that additional sandwiches were available in an adjoining room, and to help themselves to as much as they wanted, provided that they had to get and eat the sandwiches one at a time--no loading up their plate before sitting down to dig in.

What the study found was that the heavy people would invariably finish whatever was set before them at the outset, whether a small amount or large amount. They tended not to get up for more food. The normal weight people would sometimes leave food, and sometimes clean their plates and go get another sandwich.

The conclusion was that the normal weight subjects used internal cues to determine satiation and the heavy ones used external triggers (plate is clean, I'll stop eating). Sounds simplistic given the state of what we know today, but that's how I remember it.

fuzz