By Madhu Gadia, M.S., R.D.
Photos by Scott Little
Food styling by Greg Luna
Our girth is growing with supersize snacks and meals. Want a simple solution? Pick the right plates, bowls, cups—and portions—and your weight will decrease.
Most of us are aware that restaurants and food manufacturers have adopted the bad habit of supersizing meals, drinks, and snacks. What may surprise you is this: We’re doing the same thing at our dinner tables. Food packages, dishware, and even recipes have evolved to encourage us to eat more than we need. And it turns out that we are not good at pushing the extra portions away: Studies show that the more food we’re given, the more we eat.
Most of us need a quick course in portion sizes, says Lisa R. Young, Ph.D., R.D., nutrition consultant at New York University. She is alarmed at the portion distortion that has occurred in this country in the past few decades. “Everything we eat today is bigger—bagels, muffins, sodas, burgers, you name it. They’re often two to five times larger,” Young says. “The sizes of our mugs, glasses, bowls, and plates have increased. So we pile more calories into those dishes.”
It is challenging to find appropriately sized kitchenware: 6-ounce juice glasses, 8-ounce milk glasses, 9-inch dinner plates, and 4-ounce bowls. Rather than those standard sizes, we are more likely to have cupboards full of 11-inch plates, 11- to 24-ounce glasses, and 8- to 20-ounce bowls. A mug of coffee might hold 16–24 ounces today. Drink two mugs daily and you are downing the equivalent of four to six cups of coffee.
Since 1960, the size of a typical American family has decreased, yet the magnitude of our meals has grown. Spacious kitchens, walk-in pantries, and commercial-size refrigerators have become commonplace. Recipes also are providing directions for making larger servings, says Young, who has written a book on the topic, The Portion Teller (Morgan Road Books; 2005). She compared identical recipes in different editions of Joy of Cooking (Scribner) and discovered that the current recipes make fewer portions. “For example, the same brownie recipe using identical ingredients yielded 30 brownies in the 1970s and 16 brownies now," she says. Each brownie is now twice as big.”
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