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The Fooducate blog brings us a brief visual primer on a simple concept: The USDA "recommended serving size" no longer bears any resemblance whatsoever to the actual portion size served by modern American restaurants and industrial manufacturers.
Through a series of photos juxtaposing fractional food items (the USDA serving) with actual-size cookies, steaks, and muffins, the post makes a relatively salient point very clearly: The way we label food is out of whack with the way that food is actually eaten.
Whether it's time to relabel most of America's foods, time to start eating much smaller portions, or some combination thereof, there definitely needs to be some action taken—what we think we're eating and what we're actually eating no longer really sync up.
Image source: CHOW.com
Westville79-- Yes. Most people give their kids portions that are too big for their body, especially of fatty unhealthy things. The rec portion size for most children is 2/3 that of an adult. A lot of kids eat of adult portions. Watching my nephew (yes, my nephew) eat a box and a half of macaroni and cheese on vacation made that pretty clear. Terrible parenting.
Well, you know where this is going. Pretty soon we'll have the FDA regulating portion size. Then some city councilman in New York City will introduce a bill to limit portion sizes in New York City restaurants to the "recommended" portion sizes approved by the FDA. Restrauteurs will obey, but, strangely, prices for the reduced sized meals won't go down.
The foregoing sounds preposterous, but...+READ
Well, you know where this is going. Pretty soon we'll have the FDA regulating portion size. Then some city councilman in New York City will introduce a bill to limit portion sizes in New York City restaurants to the "recommended" portion sizes approved by the FDA. Restrauteurs will obey, but, strangely, prices for the reduced sized meals won't go down.
The foregoing sounds preposterous, but then, who would have thought we'd have Chicago banning foie gras, New York City banning trans fats, San Francisco imposing a special health care tax on restaurants, New York City banning smoking in the park, etc.? I understand that a host of states are considering taxing sugared soft drinks. When the State decides to determine what you and I can eat or drink and how much of it we can eat or drink, we're all in trouble!-COLLAPSE
Can someone do this story but focus on kids. Are we making our kids fat due to serving size and not just what we feed them?
I don't know what the USDA has to do with "serving size". The serving size varies from one package size to another of the same product and from similar product to similar product of the same or different manufacturer, making it difficult to compare the nutritional components. We really need to label per 100g as the do in Europe.
The problem is real, but who on earth introduced this "USDA recommended" interpretation? It adds a completely different, and I believe gratuitous and distracting, spin to the actual issue. Nutritional analysis labels specify a _serving size_ as reference point for content numbers that follow. These "serving sizes" are somewhat arbitrary in the US. Anyone who has read these labels for years...+READ
The problem is real, but who on earth introduced this "USDA recommended" interpretation? It adds a completely different, and I believe gratuitous and distracting, spin to the actual issue. Nutritional analysis labels specify a _serving size_ as reference point for content numbers that follow. These "serving sizes" are somewhat arbitrary in the US. Anyone who has read these labels for years notices that some foods with potentially embarassing analysis numbers choose unrealistically small serving sizes. Example: How often do people consume just half of a small package of instant "ramen" noodles or "noodle bowl?" Those packages sometimes contain well over USDA daily sodium limit, but calculating from an artificially low portion size plays down this point (except to readers who use their brain). Because this euphemistic practice is selective, mainly in cases of very embarassing analysis numbers, it is presumably the _manufacturer_ that chose the "portion size" for the analysis. I've never seen anything to suggest that USDA itself initiated or "recommended" these artificial serving sizes. Nutritional analyses do routinely mention USDA standards (with implicitly varied interpretations, e.g. sodium will show a recommended maximum number but protein a recommended minimum) which people sometimes misunderstand. But wording in this story suggests that someone went further and misintrepreted manufacturers' arbitrary "serving sizes" as government recommendation. I believe that's wrong, misleading, and needs retraction, unless clearly promoted by USDA itself, in which case that part would be the real news and should be clearer.-COLLAPSE
I don't get the 250-350 goal for a meal either. If we're supposed to be eating between 2000-2500 calories where are the other 1000 calories going to come from? Total junk too? If you're eating a 700 calorie sandwich for lunch and that's all you're eating, it's a perfectly reasonable serving size if you eat roughly the same amount for other meals and don't snack.
There is a slight difference in meaning between:
"The USDA "recommended serving size" no longer bears any resemblance whatsoever to the actual portion size served by modern American restaurants and industrial manufacturers"
and
"The actual portion size served by modern American restaurants and industrial manufacturers no longer bears any resemblance whatsoever to the USDA recommended...+READ
There is a slight difference in meaning between:
"The USDA "recommended serving size" no longer bears any resemblance whatsoever to the actual portion size served by modern American restaurants and industrial manufacturers"
and
"The actual portion size served by modern American restaurants and industrial manufacturers no longer bears any resemblance whatsoever to the USDA recommended serving size."
That's an interesting choice the writer made.-COLLAPSE
I had the dubious honour of supervising a large hospital kitchen where our dinner meat portion size was 3 oz. The guideline from the nutrition world is that your meat portion should be about the size of a deck of cards!
The good news is that on this guideline, filet mignon and pricey fish could be on your menu at home a lot more often.....quality over quantitiy might do us all some good!
...+READ
I had the dubious honour of supervising a large hospital kitchen where our dinner meat portion size was 3 oz. The guideline from the nutrition world is that your meat portion should be about the size of a deck of cards!
The good news is that on this guideline, filet mignon and pricey fish could be on your menu at home a lot more often.....quality over quantitiy might do us all some good!
Happy Healthful Eating!-COLLAPSE
Let's be realistic, 250-350 calories is really small for a meal. If I eat that, and just that, for a meal. I'm going to still be hungry. 700 calories is not a crazy amount for many people to eat for lunch.
I'm not surprised one bit by the muffin and cookie.
If the US were a metric nation, it'd be simple just do as in Europe and label nutrition per 100g as well as by suggested serving on all packaging. It makes comparing different products against each other really easy, and makes the maths easier when it comes to working out the nutritional details of the portion you're actually eating - you can weigh out servings of, for example, pasta really...+READ
If the US were a metric nation, it'd be simple just do as in Europe and label nutrition per 100g as well as by suggested serving on all packaging. It makes comparing different products against each other really easy, and makes the maths easier when it comes to working out the nutritional details of the portion you're actually eating - you can weigh out servings of, for example, pasta really easily on kitchen scales and figure out what you're consuming.-COLLAPSE