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By JANET K. KEELER, Times Staff Writer
Does anybody really believe that a 12-inch frozen pizza serves six people? If you invited that many friends for dinner, you'd be more likely to bake at least two, maybe three. The bitter truth, though, is on the nutrition label of Red Baron's Bake to Rise pepperoni pizza and others like it. Servings Per Container: 6. We know what you're thinking, because we thought the same thing. "Six what? Six kindergarteners? Six people too sick to eat? Six gerbils?" Well, no. That would be the servings for six people, fully grown, who were being very careful to eat just the right amount of food recommended by a stern dietitian, but not the portions most of us would normally eat from that pie. And therein lies part of the reason for the ever-expanding American waistline. Our idea of healthful and proper portions is so out of whack that we view four slices of pizza as dinner rather than as more than half a day's worth of calories. We are super-sizing more than ever, both our food and our clothing size. We are also getting more of our daily nutrition from frozen foods and restaurants, the main sources tempting us with bigger portions. Food portions began to grow in the 1980s, and not so coincidentally, that's when Americans started putting on weight in epidemic proportions, says Lisa Young, an adjunct professor in New York University's department of nutrition and food studies. Research by Young and department head Marion Nestle, who tracked the parallels between portion sizes and weight, was published in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health. According to the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity, obesity rates have increased by 60 percent over the past decade and doubled in children during the past 20 years. Type II diabetes has increased 50 percent in the past 10 years, mostly because of poor diet and lack of exercise. The alliance, along with Young, Nestle and health professionals across the country, point the finger at the bigger portions we are consuming. Here's what they see: Restaurant dinner plates have grown from a standard 101/2 inches to 121/2. Maggiano's Little Italy, a restaurant chain that has an outlet at Tampa's Westshore Mall, uses a 155/8-inch model for its large serving of pasta, which weighs a whopping 1 pound. That's before the sauce. The smallest coffee at Starbuck's is a 12-ounce "tall." "It's comical in this country that a small is a tall," Young says. McDonald's no longer lists small fries on its menu board, though it includes that size in a child's Happy Meal. 7-Eleven's 64-ounce Double Gulp is five times larger than a standard can of soda. It's also equivalent to more than one-third of the calories most people need in a day to maintain their weight. Car cup holders in many newer models are bigger to accommodate ever-growing coffee cups, soda containers and water bottles. Trying to use cup holders in older cars reminds us how big our eyes, or thirst, have grown. "Food manufacturers are going to always say you don't have to eat it all," Young says. "But there is a lot of research that says people eat more when they are presented more." Food is cheap compared with other restaurant costs, such as labor, maintenance and insurance. An additional 30 cents for the next-biggest size of coffee costs the business pennies, Young says. The consumer, however, thinks she's getting a bargain, and in today's economy, shoppers see larger size as adding value for higher prices. That's the reason the kid behind the concession counter at the movies always says, "You can get the large for a quarter more." The business owner makes more money, and you get more calories, unless you're drinking diet soda. One of the most difficult concepts in the world of nutrition for nonprofessionals to understand is the difference between a serving and a portion. If you didn't know there was a difference, join the club. "Portion" is an inexact word we use for whatever amount of a particular food we eat at a meal, and a portion is usually much larger than a serving, which, Young says, is a standard unit devised by government nutritionists. Servings are what the Food Pyramid Guide is based on and how nutritional labels are figured. For instance, a serving from the grain group is a 1-ounce slice of bread, 1 cup of ready-to-eat cereal or 1/2 cup of cooked cereal, rice or pasta. Those amounts are comparable in calories and nutritional content. Serving units and nutritional labels are meant to provide consumers with a uniform way to compare foods, not necessarily to tell them how much to eat. How much you eat -- and how many servings you eat at a sitting -- should be determined in part by your age, gender, activity level and appetite. A portion is what you put on your plate. In other words, if you eat half the 12-inch pizza, that is your portion. However, according to nutrition guidelines, you've had three servings. Look at it this way. You order spaghetti and meatballs at an Italian restaurant and eat two slices of bread while you're waiting for dinner. You might think of everything in front of you as your "portion," but it's many servings. That's probably 2 cups of pasta, 1 cup of tomato sauce and 6 ounces of meatballs. According to the Food Pyramid, you'll have ingested six servings of grains (the pasta amounted to four servings, and the bread added two), two servings of vegetables (each 1/2 cup of sauce is a serving) and two to three servings of protein (one serving is 2 to 3 ounces). That's about all the grains and meat a 150-pound, sedentary person should eat in a day. Let's hope you skipped breakfast or lunch. A 200-pound football player, though, is only about halfway through the day's grain servings. The food pyramid has been criticized recently by people who think Americans are eating too many carbohydrates, which are making us fat. The pyramid is also under criticism for its one-size-fits all recommendations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is reviewing the science of the chart, and says it will consider alternatives if a more useful way of presenting the information is discovered. Young says the government's recommended daily amounts are solid, though she would recommend more whole grains. The pyramid does call for too many carbohydrates if people interpret the 6 to 11 servings as how many times a day to eat grains. Those people might erroneously count all the spaghetti served by the restaurant as one serving. More often though, people don't count servings at all, Young says. "What we need is (for) people to pay attention to what they are eating," she says. "People are so focused on certain nutrients when they need to be aware of amounts." A good example is McDonald's decision to eliminate unhealthful fryer oil containing trans-fatty acids. Changing to a more healthful oil to cook fries won't change that the fries are still about 550 calories. It's all about calories, Young says. If you take in more than you expend, you gain weight. If you take in less than you expend, you lose weight. "People lose weight on the Atkins diet not because they are just eating meat. It's because they are restricting their calories by not eating ice cream," she says. According to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, a 5-foot-5 sedentary woman who weighs 150 pounds needs 1,816 to 1,982 calories a day to provide enough energy to function and maintain weight. An active woman the same size needs 2,267 to 2,477 calories. For a 5-foot-9 sedentary man who weighs up to 169 pounds, 2,222 to 2,538 calories is adequate; for an active man the same size, 2,683 to 3,078 calories. Perhaps our fascination with big, bigger and biggest will someday wane. There are a few subtle signs that is already happening. BMW's tiny Mini Cooper is this year's "it" car, and oh, how we love our itty, bitty cell phones. We like our female celebrities extra skinny, too. For now, though, we love our monster bagels more. That's okay, as long as we know a 6-ounce poppy seed bagel is six servings of grains. Did you know that? - Information from Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle and other Times wire services was used in this report.
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