Tips To Keep Food Serving Sizes Reasonable

What are appropriate food serving sizes? I've been pondering this question lately and usually I come up with additional questions rather than hard and fast answers.

Is a serving size the amount of food that is on your plate? Is it the amount that comes pre-wrapped when you buy a product? What about products that are purchased in bulk? Do people even pay attention to the food serving size information on packaging?

Reminder

A pause point is anything that triggers you to think about what you're eating.

We do a lot of eating based on external cues and availability without considering food serving sizes. In other words, when you're in the movie theater and you buy popcorn, you are likely to eat all of the small size, even more if you buy the medium size and even more if you buy the jumbo size. When we see a large container of food we tend to give ourselves permission to eat more of it. Hunger plays a minor role.

When a product is not individually wrapped we assume the package is a single serving, and the bigger the serving container, the more we eat.

Soft drinks are a good example. A can of soda may say 2.5 servings on the can (in very tiny print) but we all know when we pop the top we are drinking all of it ourselves. We are not looking for another 1.5 people to share it with.

The Popcorn Serving Size Experiment

There have been some interesting experiments in this field. Brian Wansink, in his book Mindless Eating shares the story of the college students who were given popcorn in medium containers and large containers. Those who were given the large containers invariably ate more than those given the medium containers.

This popcorn experiment is almost a staple in the world of research on portion size and Wansink has discovered the same results over and over again. The part of the country didn't matter, what kind of movie was showing had no effect, the freshness or staleness of the popcorn had no effect, and it didn't matter if the participants were hungry or full when they sat down to watch the movie. It was always the same. Give the students a lot of popcorn and they eat a lot of popcorn.

What can we do about this? Like most things food related awareness is key. Now that you understand what's happening you are in a position to do something about it.

What You Can Do Right Now About Food Serving Sizes At Home

At home, if you serve food family style, use smaller plates and smaller serving bowls. If you made enough for two meals, anticipating the leftovers for tomorrow night's dinner, then leave half of the food in the kitchen and only serve what you expect family members to eat at this meal. This will reduce the availability of second helpings and a unconscious signal that there is a lot of food so they can eat more.

Even better is to fill the plates in the kitchen. That way you are in control of the food serving sizes. Put only the veggies on the table family style to encourage family members to eat more veggies.

Use smaller plates for individuals. When they eat off of a plate that appears full, people feel more satisfied. When you use a larger plate, there is an automatic desire to fill it with larger food serving sizes.

If you buy in bulk, put the food into baggies, or some other container immediately so that you can use only the mount intended for a portion. I do this even for things like croutons.

When I am making a salad, I tend to surround myself with all of the ingredients I intend to use in the salad. I line up the veggies, the cheese or eggs or any other protein I might include and the "toppings" like raisins or nuts or croutons.

I notice when I put the box or bag of croutons on the island I grab a few and keep them handy as I chop. Slice a tomato, eat a crouton. Cut up the peppers, toss back another crouton. By the time the salad is complete I have eaten a lot of croutons.

I started taking the box of croutons and putting the contents into snack size baggies before I even put the box in the pantry. Now when I lay out my salad ingredients, I have one baggie and that's all that I put in. No more snacking on them.

This baggie ritual is especially important for snack foods. If you snack from a big bag or box while watching TV, you are so distracted by the television, or radio, or book, that you are not paying attention to how much you are eating. The result is to eat until the bag or box is empty.

Make Your Own Pause Points

When you think about food serving sizes try to build in pause points when the manufacturer has not done this for you. A pause point is anything that triggers you to think about what you're eating. For instance when you eat crackers that are packaged in paper sleeves you have to pause to open a new sleeve when you finish one. Stopping to open the sleeve is a pause point to think about whether you really want more or not.

Reminder

When a product is not individually wrapped we assume the package is a single serving, and the bigger the serving container, the more we eat.

When you use the baggie technique you are creating stopping points or pause points that the manufacturer has not provided.

Consider buying foods that are individually wrapped. I buy raisins in the extra tiny boxes because I can always make myself stop after one box. It's worth the little bit of extra expense.

Source: Wansink, Brian. Mindless Eating. Bantam Books: New York, 2006.

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