The Portion is the Person

When I took my all-to-brief holiday in Scotland last year, I was impressed by the lack of overweight people in that country — and likewise taken aback upon my return to the the Super-Sized U.S.

Now there is some data that helps to explain why, as a nation, we have become so…ample. It seems that we’ve been happily goosing up the calories in what constitutes a serving.

For example…

Two slices of pizza in 1989 was worth about 500 calories. In 2009, those same two slices are worth 850 calories.

And I’m old enough to remember the original 8-ounce bottle of soda, which contained only 97 calories. Today’s standard 20-ounce size bubbles up to a full 242 calories.

Just for good measure (so to speak), let’s tack on a nice “personal” size bag of chips for another 300 calories…

…and there’s your lunch, at 1,400 calories. Just a little less than 1/2 of (what should be) your entire daily intake.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how you can escape the super-size trap.

This entry was posted on June 4, 2009 at 12:24 am and is filed under nutrition. 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.

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