If you're a member of the Clean Plate Club - you eat pretty much everything you put on your plate - you're not alone! A new Cornell University study shows that the average adult eats 92% of whatever he or she puts on his or her plate. "If you put it on your plate, it's going into your stomach," says Brian Wansink Ph.D., author of the forthcoming book, Slim by Design, Professor of Marketing and Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. 
 
 Wansink and co-author Katherine Abowd Johnson analyzed 1179 diners and concluded that we're a Clean Plate Planet. Although diners were analyzed in 8 developed countries, the US, Canada, France, Taiwan, Korea, Finland, and the Netherlands, the results were nearly identical. If we serve it, we'll eat it regardless of gender or nationality. "Part of why we finish most of what we serve is because we are aware enough to know how much we'll want in the first place," says Johnson. 
 
 The finding did not hold true with children. Analysis of 326 participants under 18 years old, showed that the average child eats only 59% of what he or she serves. "This might be because kids are less certain about whether they will like a particular food," says Wansink. "Regardless, this is good news for parents who are frustrated that their kids don't clean their plate. It appears few of them do." 
 
 Wansink says that these findings, published in the International Journal of Obesity, can positively impact an individual's eating behavior, "Just knowing that you're likely to consume almost all of what you serve yourself can help you be more mindful of appropriate portion size." Next time you grab that serving spoon, think to yourself, "How much do I want to eat?" and serve accordingly. 
 
 ### ||||| Seems that most of us take to heart the common admonition to clean our plates, at least when we fill them ourselves. 
 
 Adults eat nearly 92% of the food they put on their plates, according to research published in the International Journal of Obesity. 
 
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 FOR THE RECORD 
 
 An earlier version of this post misspelled the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 
 
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 There were some variations: If people were distracted, they ate less, almost 89% of what they took; they ate 92.8% of meals but only 76.1% of snacks. At home or in a lab, the amount eaten was about the same, and men and women ate the same percentages. 
 
 “If you put it on your plate, it’s going into your stomach,” said Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and the study’s lead researcher. Wansink, who frequently studies eating habits, conducted the research with Katherine Abowd Johnson, a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 
 
 The studies that looked at children showed they ate about 60% of what they took. 
 
 Nor is the urge to clean our plates strictly an American trait: The results were nearly identical in the United States, Canada, France, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland and the Netherlands. 
 
 A bit of good news: People who were eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean meat or dairy ate more – 91.2% -- than those eating less healthful foods – 80.6%. 
 
 The researchers wanted to try to fill in a gap in studies about how much we eat, noting that portion size – particularly its increase – seems connected to the epidemic of overweight and obesity. Some studies measure what people take when they serve themselves, such as at buffets. Others measure how much of a plate of food that’s served people ate. Wansink and Johnson wanted to look at how much people ate when they served themselves. 
 
 They analyzed 14 studies. Their study, the researchers said, offers preliminary evidence on the topic but can give people some direction in the search for a path to a healthier population. 
 
 As researchers from several disciplines work to find ways to address overeating and obesity, figuring out what makes people consume more or less is an important goal. The researchers in the current study noted that when a study shows, for example, that skipping a meal led people to take 200 extra calories at the following meal, what really matters is how much of the food they ate. 
 
 This study could help suggest the answer. And the answer generally is "most of it." 
 
 “Just knowing that you’re likely to consume almost all of what you serve yourself can help you be more mindful of appropriate portion size,” Wansink said in a statement. 
 
 Care about your food? Follow me on Twitter: @mmacvean ||||| Need to lose weight? Instead of changing yourself, you might consider changing your environment. 
 
 Making changes – big and small – to the world around you is much easier than mustering the willpower to refrain from eating high-calorie foods, says Brian Wansink, who has for years studied our eating habits, currently as director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. 
 
 And those changes can mean that your diet is more healthful without working so hard. 
 
 Wansink dismisses the popular idea that mindful eating is the way to eat what we need without overeating junk food. “For 90% of us, the solution to mindless eating is not mindful eating – our lives are just too crazy and our willpower’s too wimpy,” he writes in his new book, “Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life.” 
 
 The book includes ways restaurants, schools and other institutions can offer more healthful food, and provides scorecards for readers to figure out whether their homes and workplaces, the restaurants and supermarkets they patronize and their kids’ school meals, are designed for slim. 
 
 Restaurants and food companies are likely to change if they can make more money, Wansink noted in a telephone interview. “If a bunch of consumers say, 'Is there something you can come up with that's not French fries or a boring salad? I would eat here more often,'” then companies are likely to listen, he said. 
 
 They’re in the profits business, not in business to make people fat, he said. It’s a lesson Wansink and his students stumbled upon when they realized that the bigger the package of food, the more people ate of it, and that consumers would pay more for smaller packets that would help them control how much they ate. 
 
 Most of our lives have made us fat by design — Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University 
 
 “Eventually, Nabisco/Kraft gave my theory a run and launched the 100-calorie snack pack,” Wansink writes. It’s the sort of change that helps people eat less with no effort. 
 
 “Most of our lives have made us fat by design,” Wansink said. So it’s time, he said, to make ourselves thin the same way. Here are some of his findings and suggestions; pick those that work for you, he says. 
 
 --If you come home through your kitchen door, you’ll weigh more than your neighbor who goes home through another room. Solution? Kind of obvious. 
 
 --Wansink and his researchers spent a lot of time watching and cataloging the behavior of people who ate at buffet restaurants. The slim diners scouted out the entire spread before taking any food and then cherry-picked their favorites. Heavy diners went straight for the plates and started piling on from the start of the line. And thin diners sat far from the buffet facing away from it. You can guess what the others did. 
 
 --If your plate is the same color as your food, you’re likely to serve yourself 18% more food. You can either buy new dishes, or color-code your meals if you want to eat less. But here’s a hint: White plates and lots of pasta, potatoes and rice? Maybe not. Smaller plates are better, too. 
 
 --Clear the counters! The average woman who had potato chips on her counter weighed 8 pounds more than a neighbor who did not, Wansink writes. Big deal, it’s chips, you say? Get this: Woman with a box of breakfast cereal visible anywhere in the kitchen weighed 21 pounds more than that neighbor who kept it in the cupboard, Wansink writes. 
 
 --If you are really serious, move your pantry food to a closet elsewhere in the house and that closet’s stuff into the kitchen closet. Or put up shelves in a faraway room to hold the food. That, Wansink writes, will decrease “browsing” for snacks and make you think before the food gets to your mouth. 
 
 --Buying in bulk saves money, right? But Wansink writes that one study showed people ate half the chips, cookies, ramen noodles and the like in the first week – regardless of how much they bought. What to do? Buy only healthful foods in bulk. Or, repackage the items once you get home and store some far from the kitchen, he writes. 
 
 --Pay attention to the menu. On average, Wansink writes, a dish described as “buttery” has 102 more calories than a similar one not described that way. Crispy? Adds 131 calories, he writes. 
 
 --To lessen cravings while in the supermarket, chew gum, Wansink says. When he and colleagues gave shoppers gum at the start of a shopping trip, they bought 7% less junk food than their empty-mouthed fellow shoppers.
– Feeling guilty about that huge serving you heaped onto your plate at dinner last night and promptly finished? You're not the only one who does it. New research published in the International Journal of Obesity finds that the average adult eats 92% of the food on his or her plate. The reasons have yet to be hashed out, but the reality is clear: "If you put it on your plate, it's going into your stomach," says Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, in a Eureka Alert press release. The findings hold across several developed countries. Researchers observed 1,179 diners in the US, Canada, France, Taiwan, Korea, Finland, and the Netherlands, and regardless of location or gender the results were almost identical. There is, however, one exception: kids. Observing 326 participants under 18, researchers found that the typical child eats 59% of the food he or she puts on the plate. Whatever the reason, we grow up to belong to the Clean Plate Club, as researchers call it, they say this can be a wake-up call to be more mindful of what we serve ourselves in the first place. The LA Times susses out one piece of good news along those lines: Those who pile on fruits, veggies, whole grains, and other healthful stuff tend to clean their plates more thoroughly than those who eat less healthful foods. (Other research suggests it's all the sitting, not eating, that's putting on the pounds.)