Eat Healthy
"Clean your plate!" and "Be a member of the clean-plate club!" Just about every kid in the UK has heard this from a parent or grandparent. Often, it"s
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by an appeal: "Just think about those starving orphans in Africa!" Sure, we should be
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for every bite of food. Unfortunately, many people in the UK take too many bites. Instead of staying "clean the plate", perhaps we should
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some food for tomorrow.
According
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the news reports, UK restaurants are partly to blame for the growing bellies(肚子). A waiter puts a plate of food in front of each customer, with two to four times the
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recommended by the government, according to a
UK Today story
. The British traditionally
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quantity with value and most restaurants try to give them that. They prefer to have customers complain
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too much food rather than too little.
Barbara Rolls, a nutrition professor at London University, told
the Times
that restaurant portion sizes began to grow in the 1970s, the same time that the British waistline began to
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.
Health experts have tried to get ninny restaurants to
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smaller portions. Now, apparently, some customers are calling
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this too. The restaurant industry trade magazine
QSR
reported last month that 57 percent of more than 4,000 people
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believe restaurants serve portions that are too large; 23 percent had no opinion; 20 percent disagreed. But a closer
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at the survey indicates that many Americans who can"t afford fine dining still prefer large portions. Seventy percent of
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earning at least $150,000 per year prefer smaller portions; but only 45 percent of those earning less than $25,000 want smaller.
It"s not
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working class Americans don"t want to eat healthy. It"s just that, after long hours at low-paying jobs, getting less on their plate hardly seems like a good
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. They live from paycheck to paycheck, happy to save a little money for next year"s Christmas presents.