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Be Portion Control Conscious
Posted December 11, 2002
Almost no one can stop eating after just one normal serving
if their plate has extra food -- regardless of whether they
served themselves or were given a pre-filled plate.
A new study comes just in time to help those facing holiday
buffets and family dinners be more aware of the tendency to
gobble down huge portions.
A team led by Barbara Rolls, a nutrition researcher at Pennsylvania
State University, gave 51 normal-weight and overweight men
and women, aged 21 to 30, lunch one day a week for four weeks
in the university laboratory. Each week, the subjects were
served macaroni and cheese in one of four portion sizes, ranging
from 2.5 cups to 5 cups. One group served themselves, while
another were served plates filled with food.
All participants, whether served food or self-served, ate
more when more food was available -- but they didn't feel
any fuller despite eating more, Rolls found.
"The bottom line is, if you give people bigger portions
they are going to eat more, " Rolls says. "They
are not aware [of it]. And they are not going to feel fuller
if they eat more."
If they did that in the laboratory, she predicts the situation
will probably be much worse in the real world. At a restaurant,
for instance, food is plentiful, people are often socializing
and drinking, and the attention paid to portion size is likely
to decline even more than in the lab, Rolls says.
Big portions aren't always undesirable, she hastens to add.
"Reduce the calories in the food you are eating. Big
portions of some foods can be a good thing. A salad with a
low-fat dressing is good as a big portion." So are big
portions of fruits and vegetables such as cantaloupe, carrots,
blueberries, apples, and grapes that tend to fill a person
up, she says.
Broth-based soups are good, too, in big portions. Rolls calls
this strategy of eating large portions of foods low in calories
and fat -- yet filling -- "volumetrics," as outlined
in her books, including The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan,
due out in paperback soon.
Rolls observed that five people in each of the groups was
a "plate cleaner," eating all but 30 grams of the
macaroni and cheese. When she excluded them from the analysis,
the effect of portion size was still there. The non-plate
cleaner subjects in both the served and self-served groups
consumed 27 percent more food when they were offered the largest
portions compared with the smallest.
The study makes sense to Evelyn Tribole, a registered dietitian
in Irvine, Calif., and author of the book Intuitive Eating,
a paperback due out in 2003. Simply paying attention to what
you are eating, without doing two or three other things at
once, can help people be more aware of how much they are eating,
she says. "We are so multi-tasking these days. Most people
are eating and reading, or eating and working on the computer.
If you really love food, you need to sit and savor and have
the food experience."
Start out small to avoid overeating, Tribole advises. "Order
a small stack of pancakes," she tells clients who need
to lose weight. "They don't think it will be enough."
But it often is.
What To Do
For information on portion sizes, try the American Dietetic
Association or the Cleveland Clinic.
Date: December 9, 2002
Copyright © 2002 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved
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