Health & Fitness

Tuesday July 19, 2011

Big plates , big waistlines

By Judy Hevrdejs

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. The 9-inch plate holds serving sizes printed on the packages.

9-inch plate
2 ounces pasta
(1 cup cooked) equals 210 calories
{cup sauce equals 60 calories
3 meatballs
(3 ounces) equals 250 calories
Total: 520 calories

10-inch plate
4 ounces pasta equals 420 calories
1 cup sauce equals 120 calories
4 meatballs
(4 ounces) equals 333 calories
Total: 873 calories

12-inch plate
6 ounces pasta equals 630 calories
1 { cups sauce equals 180 calories
5 meatballs
(5 ounces) equals 417 calories
Total: 1,227 calories

---

(c) 2011, Chicago Tribune. Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.