NUCCA News - Larger portions bring larger appetites

Wed Jan 22,10:24 AM ET Add Top Stories - USA TODAY to My Yahoo!

Nanci Hellmich USA TODAY

Americans are eating significantly bigger portions of fries, chips and burgers and drinking more soda than they did 20 years ago -- sometimes consuming 50, 100 or even more calories of the food, according to new research.

For years, nutritionists and consumers have noticed that restaurants are serving bigger portions, but now two large studies estimate how much more Americans are actually chowing down when they're dining out or at home eating meals or snacks.

The findings may help explain why more than 120 million Americans are either overweight or obese. The number has been rising dramatically since the late '70s.

In one of the new studies, researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill examined three large nationally representative surveys on food consumption conducted from 1977 through 1998. The surveys collected data on what more than 63,000 people said they ate.

The findings, reported in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, reveal that the average portion eaten at one sitting of:

* Salty snacks (crackers, chips, pretzels) increased from 1 ounce to 1.6 ounces, up 93 calories.

* Mexican fare (burritos, tacos, enchiladas) went from 6.3 ounces to 8 ounces, up 133 calories.

''Portions sizes are probably larger than what is being reported in this study,'' partly because the last data was collected in 1998, and sizes have increased since then, says Samara Joy Nielsen, a nutrition researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill. Also, people underreport what they are eating, she says.

In another study, Penn State researchers looked at the changes in portion sizes that people consumed from 1990 through 1995. Among the findings in the January issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association:

* People consumed larger portions of a third of the 107 foods analyzed. That includes bread, cookies, cereal, fries, coffee, wine and fruit juice.

* The

average amount of beer consumed by men older than 40 went from 23 to 32 ounces, about 100 more calories.

''When we are presented with larger sizes of foods, we do eat them,'' says Penn State researcher Helen Smiciklas-Wright.

Lisa Young, a nutrition researcher at New York University, says because restaurants offer huge portions, people expect to eat bigger servings at home, too. When she studied recipes in classic cookbooks and on food packages, she found some have created bigger portions. ''The Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from 1949 yielded 100 cookies. That same recipe today is 60 cookies,'' says Young, whose study will be published in the February issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

Marion Nestle, nutrition professor at New York University, says, ''There's no end in sight to the supersizing of portions and the supersizing of us.''

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