It is two years since Super Size Me hit our cinema screens and
images of oversized burgers, shakes and colas haunted our national psyche.
Recent research indicates that when people saw the film in 2005, it acted on
them as a catalyst, changing the choices they made in fast-food outlets.
This is great news for people who really love McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s
and KFC, but for those who would not be seen dead crossing the threshold of
such establishments, no such lessons were learnt.
This is a pity, since the growth of portion sizes has not been restricted to
fast-food outlets. I know this because I recently flicked through my 1988
edition of Portion Size, published by what was the Ministry of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food – it was a must-have reference book for
nutrition undergraduates back then – after arriving home with a scone I had
bought from a well-known high street coffee chain.
I realised on retrieving it from its brown paper bag that the scone looked
more like a mini-fruitcake than a little snack to fill that afternoon hunger
gap. So I weighed it and compared this with its equivalent 20 years ago.
Causes of the obesity epidemic
It turns out that in 1988 a standard-sized scone weighed 48g, which would have
given you 151 calories. This modern-day mutant variant was a walloping 190g
and 600 calories. This is more than having an individual fancy iced cake and
a chocolate-covered Swiss roll plus a slice of gâteau and a slice of
Battenberg at a sitting.
Munching your way through that lot would undoubtedly leave you feeling like a
total glutton. Yet this was just one scone. Herein lies the problem. Most of
us eat the portions we are given and, if the portions are growing in size
without us realising, we are eating more, whether these supersized servings
are in the form of cheeseburgers or a harmlesslooking sultana-packed scone.
It makes me furious when I see government statistics claiming that the reason
for the obesity epidemic is not because we are eating more but, mostly,
because we are less active. It is true that we do a bit less housework than
our parents, have sedentary jobs and no doubt we walk less because of
growing reliance on cars. But let’s get things into perspective: it would
take two hours of Paula Radcliffe-type running to burn off that scone, and
how many of us have done that in a normal day?
Different lives from those of our parents
My mother may have waved her duster around more than I do, but she never, as
far my brother and I can remember, nipped out for a quick half marathon to
keep her weight under control between meeting us from school and preparing
our supper.
Our expanding girths must surely be partly down to increased intakes caused by
inflated portions. For example, had you enjoyed an “old-fashioned” croissant
for breakfast in the 1980s, you would have been eating a 30g offering
containing 112 calories. Today’s typical bakery or café version, which many
of us grab as part of a breakfast on the run, is 86g, giving it nearly three
times the calories at 321.
How many of us would seriously look at the croissant we are handed and think:
“Oh, I’d better eat only half.” Of course we don’t; we scoff the lot and
mentally add “one croissant” to our daily food tally.
You could put on more than a stone a year
The comparisons are endless. A “medium-sized” sausage roll weighed 60g in
1988. Nowadays, nip into a garage forecourt or an independent supermarket
and you are likely to find one tipping the scales at 144g. While the 60g
version was hardly a health food even back then, it gave us a comparatively
modest 228 calories and 16g of fat, compared with the 549 calories and 37g
of fat in the modern-day monster.
As children we were occasionally allowed a bag of crisps as a treat. Such a
bag was never any bigger than 25g and contained 137 calories; now individual
packs can often be as much as 50g and contain 273 calories. A medium-sized
bowl of pasta was 220g with 228 calories in 1988. Today, a typical spaghetti
ready meal is a good 450g with 620 calories.
This may not sound drastic if you think of these only as one-off examples. But
an extra 200 calories more a day will lead to more than 73,000 calories a
year. This equates to a weight gain every year of about 1st 4lb (8.2kg).
Not relying so much on processed and prepackaged foods is certainly one way to
keep a better eye on your serving sizes, but it is worth being aware of some
of the tricks we play on ourselves when getting out the pots and pans in our
kitchens.
Research has indicated, for instance, that when we serve ourselves pasta from
smaller packets we tend to take less than if pouring it out from jumbo
packs. The same goes for cook-in sauces and, if you take the logic of these
research results to their logical conclusion, presumably with other foods
such as rice.
If you do not want to buy smaller packets of staples (larger ones are usually
less expensive), then at least forewarned is forearmed and you may want to
weigh a normal portion out a few times to get a handle on what you are
eating.
The other time-honoured method of judging serving sizes is to use your fist or
other items such as a deck of cards to gauge things (or see the portion-size
gallery at www.amandaursell. com). Personally, I also think that using the
Food Pyramid (see panel right) is a handy way of determining how much food
to eat.
The Food Pyramid
The Food Pyramid is a quick, easy way of determining how much of any food
group you can eat healthily in a day. For example, each day you should eat
only 2 to 3 portions of meat or fish, but you can have 6 to 11 portions of
bread, pasta or rice, depending on your size and levels of activity. The
bigger and more active you are, the greater number of portions you can have
– but only within the parameters set down for the food in that section of
pyramid.
MILK, YOGHURT, CHEESE
In this section of the pyramid you are advised to have only 2 to 3 portions
a day. A portion of milk is defined as 225ml (between one third and half a
pint) glass of milk. Remember that even a “regular” cappuccino or latte (the
smallest size) from a typical coffee shop is 350ml. An individual 150g
yoghurt is one portion, as is a 40g (1½oz or a small matchbox size) piece of
cheese.
VEGETABLES
Thankfully you can pretty much go for broke when it comes to the vegetable
section of the pyramid. Forget clenched fists, packs of playing cards or
boxes of matches, and tuck in with gay abandon.
FATS AND SUGAR
The items at the top of the pyramid such as fats, butter, oils and sweet
things are to be eaten sparingly – a teaspoon of oil at a time, a tiny pat
of butter and the odd boiled sweet or few squares of chocolate.
MEAT, FISH, POULTRY
You can have 2 to 3 portions of meat, poultry, fish and legumes such as
lentils a day. In each case, one portion is about the size of a deck of
cards.
FRUIT
With fruit, 2 to 4 portions is the maximum advised, with a portion
being one piece of fruit or, say, for a melon something the size of a
clenched fist.
BREAD, RICE, PASTA
You can have 6 to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta a day. A
small, inactive woman would need only 6, a strapping young man more like 11.
It may sound a lot but a portion of cooked rice or potatoes, for example, is
the size of a small fist. A slice of bread is one portion.
The size of plates and bowls has changed a lot over the years and the fashion now is for very large ones, which makes it even easier to eat larger portions than you should. The bowls sold for pasta, for example, are really big. I'm on the lookout for some more modest sized crockery!
Michaela, Gillingham, UK
I weigh 8.5 stone, am 5'6" tall. When I had metabolic testing done using a treadmill, it showed that I burned an avg of 120 calories per mile traversed. That's a low burn rate compared to the average adult woman, and very low compared to the average adult male (primarily because at a given speed, one burns more calories the more one weighs, and "average" weights are defined as higher than mine).
But even assuming my pathetic burn rate, "Paula Radcliffe-type running" (let's say, a 5-minute per mile pace, slightly faster than her 2003 record-setting marathon pace) would negate that 600-calorie scone in 25 minutes (120 cal/mi * 5 mi = 600 calories). Not 2 hours.
Unfortunately, I can't run that fast. So 5 miles- aka 600 calories- takes me 45 minutes. Still, that's nowhere near 2 hours. And for someone heavier, w/ a higher burn rate, even fewer miles would be required to burn 600 calories at that pace.
Dead on with the portion size argument, but the energy expenditure bit is WAY off.
Kate, Sherbrooke, Canada
Well, I was a baby 20 years ago, so I can't rely on any experience. But I was pretty shocked by this article.
Being a student now I started to use tinned food and precooked pasta sauces but I think I'll change my new habits quickly. Cause it's true - you finish the opened tans or packets just not to throw them away and at the same time eat much more than you really wanted to.
Eva, vienna, austria
where in the food pyramid do soya milk and nuts fit?
anne, Leeds, UK
What an eye-opener. I remember also that my favourite Haribo sweets came in packets of about 75g when I was a child and visited my German grandparents and now they sell in packs of 200g. And, of course, I eat the whole bag once it's opened. Luckily, I'm fairly disciplined so I just buy sweets much less often than I used to.
Tina, Duesseldorf, Germany