Don’t Super Size Me
Maintaining a healthy weight is a big concern for all of us and in order to sustain optimal health and a healthy weight good nutrition is essential. Eating a balanced diet low in fat and sugar that includes a variety of vitamins and minerals, and monitoring caloric intake, and meal frequency while increasing activity level can make avoiding excessive weight gain easier. Making small permanent lifestyle improvements that are easy to maintain is one of the key elements to weight maintenance. However, a hidden concern overlooked by many is portion size.
Next time you grab a muffin or slice of pizza take a closer look, because portion sizes have increased substantially since the 1980’s. What was considered an average size muffin 20 years ago is half the size of today’s mega muffins, which are more than three times the size of one standard portion.
According to an article published in the American Journal of Public Health in February 2002, titled "The Contribution of Expanding Portion Sizes to the U.S. Obesity Epidemic" by researchers Lisa R. Young and Marion Nestle from New York University, they found that enlarged muffins were just the tip of the iceberg.
Young and Nestle gathered food samples from popular fast food, family-type, and take-out restaurants, read food package labels, and reviewed old cookbooks. They not only found that people were eating huge helpings of foods as single portions but also that portion sizes had grown over the past 30 years. Young and Nestle determined that "portion sizes began to grow in the 1970s, rose sharply in the 1980s, and have continued in parallel with increasing body weights."
The article pointed out that typical portions of pasta exceeded USDA standards by 480 percent, and cookies were more than seven times the size of one standard portion. Young and Nestle’s historical research revealed that many foods came onto the market in just one size that was small or smaller than the smallest size available today. In many fast-food restaurants burgers, fries, and sodas are now two to five times larger than sizes first introduced in the 1970’s. When it comes to food portions, size does matter and portion size is affecting the average American’s daily calorie intake – whether we like it or not.