Sleight of Hand

We call it “portion distortion.” And, while a portion is technically the amount of a specific food you decide to eat, you may not have all the information you need to know exactly how large or small that “portion” should be—or how that “portion” is maybe sabotaging your best intentions. While the terms serving and portion often are used interchangeably, they actually mean different things. Keep in mind, serving size is not portion size.

Put another way, serving size is a standard unit of measuring foods (a cup, an ounce, 2 cookies, 10 goldfish crackers). Portion size is the amount offered in the packaging of prepared foods (like the Triple Whopper from Burger King), the amount served by a restaurant, or the amount a person chooses to put on his or her plate. Sometimes the packaging itself contains more than a single serving.

And that’s where the sleight of hand comes in to play.

Before you reach for your next handful of chips, look at the back of the bag. It probably says something like, “serving size, 1 oz; servings per container, 14,” and then goes on to list calories, fat, carbs and sodium—per serving size. But, how do you know how many chips that really is? The question is important because the standard serving size shown on a package determines all the other nutritional values on the label, including calorie counts. If the listed serving size is smaller than what you really eat, (and for most of us, it usually is) you are probably getting more calories, sodium and fat than you think. The outcome—rather than helping fight obesity, the confusion over labeling terminology may simply add to the perplexity over what makes a healthful diet.

But, what about portion size? Don’t we already know what our portions should be? Do we?

According to a 2007 paper published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, portion sizes offered by fast food chains are two to five times larger than when first introduced. When McDonald’s first opened in 1955, its only hamburger weighed about 1.6 ounces. Today, the largest hamburger patty weighs 8 ounces, an increase of 400 percent. And while a Big Mac used to be considered big, it’s actually smaller than many burger options. At Burger King, you can get the Triple Whopper; at Ruby Tuesday’s there’s the Colossal Burger; and Carl’s Junior has the Western Bacon Six Dollar Burger. These are “portions,” not “servings.”

But we eat them anyway.

And more . . . Between 1977 and 1996, a small snack-size bag of chips and a Coke increased by 142 calories. Sure, it's the same snack as 30 years ago, just a bigger portion. Eat it just two or three times a week and you'll gain up to 6 pounds more this year than you would have back then.

And, still more . . . consider the single serving products that end up actually containing more than a single serving. One of the most obvious—the 20 oz soft drinks meant for a single person yet they contain two and a half servings! Obviously it’s not enough to just check the calorie count per serving, you also need to make sure the serving size suggested by the manufacturer is what you really intend to consume.

Get ready for a jolt of reality. Labels are going to change. We’ll probably see bigger labels, and we’ll see more of them on the front of packaging. We may see changes in recommended serving sizes. But, you still need to know the difference between serving size and portion size, and you need to know what the size of each should be.

Be on the look for labeling “sleight of hand” tricks—after all, shouldn’t you decide what your portion sizes should be rather than what the food industry thinks you’ll consume if you don’t know any better?

What We Eat . . . and What We Don’t

LoneStart Wellness is (in part) about making mindful, positive choices when it comes to nutrition and physical activity. Most of us know what we “should” eat, and what we “shouldn’t,” but, here’s a fun—and interesting exercise (pardon the pun).

Open your refrigerator and look inside. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that Americans waste about 30 percent of all edible food produced, bought, and sold in this country—and even acknowledges that this figure is probably low. In fact, the National Institutes of Health say that if we were to add up all the losses that occur throughout the food chain, Americans, on average, waste about 1,400 calories a day per person. If you’re making mindful, positive food choices, that’s a little more than two full meals.

Remember how mom always said, “Clean your plate. Children in (name the foreign country) are starving.” Here’s another take on this. If you add up all the resources required to grow the food that’s “lost” as it progresses from the farm that produces it, to the processor that converts it to what we buy, to our plates, would you believe that our wastefulness results in 25 percent of all freshwater and 4 percent of all oil consumed in this country? This is for food we don’t eat.

And, there’s more. About 13 percent of all municipal solid waste consists of food scraps and edible discards from our homes and commercial food-service establishments. That's 30 million tons a year. There’s more still . . . When that food reaches the landfills and decomposes, one of the by-products is methane, which has 20 times the global-warming potency of carbon dioxide. Based on Environmental Protection Agency data, rotting food may be responsible for about one-tenth of all human-related methane emissions.

Up to one-fifth of America's food goes to waste each year, with an estimated 130 pounds of food per person ending up in landfills. The annual value of this lost food is estimated at around $31billion. According to USDA statistics, more than 5.4 billion pounds of food are lost annually at the retail level, while 91 billion pounds are lost in our home kitchens, restaurants, and institutional cafeterias. In other words, food-service and consumer loss make up 95 percent of all food waste—96 billion pounds each year.

So, now we’re back to mindfulness. While we’re not advocating cleaning your plate just to avoid waste, we are suggesting smaller servings—the amount we need, no more, no less.

And, look what we can accomplish for ourselves, our individual health and our environment by better meal-planning, using leftovers creatively, and making just enough—instead of too much. It’s a simple, healthful solution. Seems obvious . . . what do you think?

Have You Heard, Diets Are Dead?

It’s true—or should be.

March is National Nutrition Month, and the sad fact is that as a population, we’re unhealthier today than we were at the time of the first National Nutrition Month in 1970. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, almost one-half of all Americans report having a chronic illness—and those illnesses account for 75 percent of our national spending on health care. Furthermore, almost 80 percent of all chronic disease is caused by three preventable health behaviors—physical inactivity, poor nutrition and overeating, and smoking. And, to help us come to terms with our overall condition, the weight loss industry will see close to $70 billion in revenue this year. (That’s 14 percent of the $500 billion a year we spend on groceries.)

What if we reevaluate this relationship of dieting and food?

When we think of a “diet” most of us think of inconvenience, deprivation and temporary sacrifice. In reality, there’s nothing temporary about it—once you achieve your goal, you have to maintain it. Now if we shift the focus from “diet” to, hmmm, say “lifestyle change,” we’re also shifting our focus from negative to positive.

This brings the focus too, to the psychology of habits, and we know habits can be made—and broken. We all get used to doing something a certain way, and before we realize it, that’s the way we do it without even thinking about the “doing” of it. As examples, consider things as simple as drinking water instead of soda, seasoning with herbs instead of salt, choosing whole grains instead of over-processed, refined products. It can be something as simple as not adding sugar to cereal coffee or tea. For many of us, this may not be easy. But it’s doable.

And while we try so hard to “do it,” we’re not getting a lot of help from the food industry.

We try to make healthy lifestyle choices, and the food industry keeps telling us why we “need” soft drinks, chips, Hamburger Helper, pizza that’s double stuffed with meat and cheese . . . you get the idea.

So, back to that “diet” word. Consider that today about 72 million of us in the United States are on some kind of diet, spending that $70 billion we mentioned earlier. That’s a little more than $1000 spent per person “dieting” on average. What would happen if instead each of these 72 million people used that $1000 to make healthier and more nutritious food choices? That averages out to about $20 per week. Now, leave out the soda, fast food, pre-packaged and highly processed choices.

Suddenly, your healthier choices become new habits, and you have a new food-lifestyle relationship. You’re not “dieting”—but look at the result!