Nutrition and Health News

One challenge for casual dieters trying to maintain a healthy, balanced food plan is the disconnect between “portions” and “servings” in many packaged and prepared food items. Increasing efficiency in food production and manufacturing, combined with consumers looking for a “better deal”, and the business economics of “supersizing” food sales, has led to a general increase in food portion sizes.

A “portion” can be thought of as the amount of a specific food you choose to eat for dinner, snack, or other eating occasion. Portions, of course can be bigger or smaller than the recommended food servings.

A “serving” is a unit of measure used to describe the amount of food recommended from each food group. It is the amount of food listed on the Nutrition Facts panel on packaged food or the amount of food recommended in the Food Guide Pyramid and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

When you hear a recommendation for 6 to 11 servings of whole grains per day, it doesn’t mean you should eat 6 to 11 whole grain bagels. A single large bagel today might contain as much as 3 or 4 “servings”, rather than just one as might be assumed by many consumers.

The US National Institute of Health has put together an interactive quiz demonstrating the increase in portion sizes of various food items over the past 20 years.
Links:

• Portion Distortion (National Institute of Health)
• Food Exchange List (National Institute of Health)
• Big Portions May Prompt Overeating (Nutrition and Health News)

Tags: diet, nutrition, weight loss, weight management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Nutrition and Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.