Abstract
This study examined the actual consumption of rice as the staple food in Japan by comparatively analyzing the rice-eating patterns of students consuming large and small amounts of rice to determine effective approaches to the most appropriate rice consumption.
Most students tended to eat all the food on their plates, so serving rice in a larger bowl may be an effective approach to increase the amount of rice eaten without emphasizing its greater volume. Assuming that the volume of a mouthful of rice is equivalent to the size of a small tomato, education to encourage the consumption of 4-5 further mouthfuls of rice may be effective. Further studies will examine whether such an approach would be effective to lead students consuming a small amount of rice toward a more appropriate rice consumption in the long term, and to devise a method to increase the volume of a mouthful of rice without decreasing the chewing time per mouthful.
