Want Not Waist
There's been a lot said recently about America's expanding waistline, and the role it plays in healthcare costs. According to ObesityinAmerica.org, obesity is responsible for 400,000 deaths each year, and costs the economy $122.9 billion annually. Documentaries like Super Size Me and Food, Inc., have pointed the finger of blame in many directions, especially the food producers. But there is a growing school of thought that says that a key to controlling this problem is for consumers like us to control our own portion size.
Early this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 68% of adults and about a third of children are overweight, including nearly 34% of adults and 17% of children who are considered obese. (The categorizations are based on body mass index, or BMI, a ratio of height to weight. A BMI of 25 or more is considered overweight, and 30 or more is considered obese. A six-foot person would be considered obese at 221 pounds. To determine your BMI, use this calculator.) Those numbers have been relatively stable for the last few years, but they are more than double the percentage of 30 years ago.
The causes for this weight gain are legion.
- An abundance of high fat, empty calorie foods like soft drinks, and the slick ad campaigns that promote them.
- The low cost of fast food meals and highly processed supermarket foods.
- An explosion in genetic and psychological disorders. Cutbacks in both school lunch and physical education programs.
- The country's obsession with electronic entertainment and other sedentary activities.
Of course, the whole topic can be just numbing, especially when you are the sort of person who shops at Sprouts and is probably already conscientious about the calories and nutritive value of the foods you buy.
But during a recent business meeting, the talk somehow came around to the topic of portion size ("portion distortion" as it is now known). And this captured our attention.
One of our Sprouts employees who recently got married remarked that the china she received as a wedding gift has plates that are much larger than the hand-me-downs she had been using from her mother. Someone else talked about how we never ate ice cream right out of the container when we were growing up. And one person lamented about the disappearance of "juice glasses" from kitchen sets; nowadays, it seems, we use the same tall table glasses for water, juice, and just about anything else — and with it come the extra calories.
The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute created a "Portion Distortion Quiz" with visual representations that show you, for example, that the movie popcorn of around 1990, containing 270 calories, has now morphed into the tub containing 630 calories.
Wonder whatever happened to that theory about eating smaller but more frequent meals....
From the July, 2010 edition of Fresh Off the Press
