Posts Tagged ‘portion control’

Increasingly, it looks like calorie counting is dead. Remember 100-calorie snack packages? They came and went early in this millenium. They were the snack food industry response to then President George W. Bush pushing against a rising tide of obesity. Back then, obesity experts speculated that those packs “might be one potentially successful approach to […]

Professor Naveed Sattar has a modest proposal for us. He chairs the UK government’s obesity healthcare goals and says smaller portions might hold the key to reducing obesity in women, children, and shorter persons. Sattar writes in Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: “When only one portion size is offered, women, children and individuals of shorter stature […]

All-you-can-eat is a trap. In repeated case studies, it drives restaurants to lose money, sometimes to the point of bankruptcy. The latest poster child is Red Lobster and its Endless Shrimp deal that brought the chain financial misery and a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. How did this happen? Why did management seemingly have no clue […]

Do Smaller Plates Make You Eat Less? You may have seen Channel 4’s Food Unwrapped. The programme covers two topics of interest to me; portion sizes and plate sizes. Portion Distortion There is evidence that portion sizes of commercially provided foods have increased over time and the programme covered this story. One of the main reasons […]

Can we educate consumers about healthy portions? Even if we do, will this have an impact on obesity? This and a host of other questions swirled through an intense day of discussions at Georgetown University Monday. The Georgetown Social Enterprise Initiative convened this closed-panel discussion. Portion Sizes Growing with Obesity While the prevalence of obesity […]

A new study published today in Obesity provides good evidence that portion control can be a very simple and effective way to improve outcomes for weight management. Cheryl Rock and colleagues conducted a randomized, controlled trial of common portion-controlled, prepackaged entrées (in this study, Lean Cuisine) to enhance a typical weight management program. Everyone in the study received […]

If you’re looking for a hot concept in weight management and food policy, portion control is a good pick. But what are the distinctions between misleading hype and real scientific outcomes. Few scientists have studied this question as thoroughly as Barbara Rolls. So it was a rare privilege at the WM DPG Symposium to have […]