America Expands

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I've been on a diet for two weeks
and all I lost is fourteen days.

— Totie Fields

If you've said anything like this recently, you're not alone. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and money on weight-loss programs, diet pills, shakes, prepackaged low-cal meals, fat- and sugar-free foods, and the latest diet books and products that promise a quick fix for our weight problems. The sad fact is that our investments are not paying off. No matter what we seem to do, we are gaining weight. And lots of it. Recent studies show that almost two-thirds of American adults are overweight. This is a staggering statistic, one that confounds nutritionists as well as the average person who wants to maintain a healthy weight. While most Americans are scratching their heads about what and how to eat—trying to pick from the confusing array of diets that are the current rage—the reason for the epidemic of obesity in this country can be traced to one simple fact: We eat too much.

Are we a nation of gluttons? I don't think so. It's the size of our food, not the size of our appetites that's to blame. The portions, servings, helpings, slices, and amounts of what we eat have grown dramatically over the past few decades. Just look around: Everywhere you go, you are encouraged to buy huge sizes. A Double Whopper at Burger King is nearly 1,000 calories; a large order of French fries at McDonald's is 540 calories. A Double Gulp at 7-Eleven is nearly 800 calories. The jumbo bucket of popcorn at a movie theater is up to 1,640 calories. The Hungry-Man XXL frozen dinner, with a slogan that says "It's good to be full!" weighs in at 1 1/2 pounds with 1,000 calories, a meal that packs enough heft for two. When presented with all this food, who can blame us? We can't help but eat more calories than we can burn. So we gain weight.

As the portion sizes offered to us have gotten bigger, so have we. Since I'm a nutritionist by training, I had some idea that America's collective waistline was growing, but it really hit me when I saw a dietary intake survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics in 1994. The shocking results? The average American adult gained eight pounds—that's eight pounds per person—in the 1980s. That might not sound like a lot, but compare it to earlier decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, the average weight of American adults increased only slightly, by a pound or two at most in the course of each decade. It's not just that we were heavier than ever, but we were gaining weight at a much faster rate. Why had weight gain accelerated so rapidly in such a short period of time? I knew it couldn't be genetic; the gene pool simply doesn't change that fast. What was it?

I had heard most of the reasons nutritionists were giving for the obesity epidemic—too much couch-potatoing in front of TVs and computers, changes in exercise patterns, unhealthy snacking and fast-food feasting. But I knew that these explanations couldn't possibly be the whole enchilada. I looked into the national exercise trends and found that there was virtually no change in exercise patterns during that time. So it had to be something else, something circumstantial, a change in our culture that was causing such a rapid weight gain in just three decades. I suspected that the cause was portion sizes.

I figured our national weight gain had more to do with how much we eat than what we eat. So I went to look at the research that had been done on portion sizes, to see if there was a connection between the trend toward supersized food portions and weight gain. To my surprise, there was no research. Nothing. Nobody seemed to have done any, not professors, government nutritionists, or weight-loss counselors. In fact, very few people even noticed that our food portions were growing so quickly. I couldn't find any hard-and-fast information on how big our food portions are, what portions weigh, how much they've changed over time, and how they compare to federal standards like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Guide Pyramid that came out in 1992 or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food labels. Here I was, surrounded by nutrition experts and academics, and no one was talking about, much less studying, portion sizes.

I decided to conduct my own research. I spent a rather hot summer riding my bicycle around Manhattan, talking to deli owners, restaurateurs, and fast-food workers, asking them all sorts of questions about what they were serving and what people were eating. I became a portion detective, carrying around a food scale, a camera, and a notebook, recording the exact size and weight of typical foods that you can pick up at places around Manhattan—a vendor cart, a take-out joint, a Times Square restaurant chain, a deli—from places you grab a quick bite on the go, to a four-course sit-down dinner. What I found was appalling. I had no idea how enormous typical food servings had become. I found bagels the size of seat cushions and muffins as big as a bread loaf. I weighed different foods—street-vendor pretzels, black-and-white cookies, prepackaged muffins, and even fruits, like apples, that are closer to a cantaloupe in size and weight. I took pictures of all-you-can-eat buffets and pasta plates overflowing with pounds of noodles and tubs of sauce. I measured cups, plates, wineglasses, and margarita buckets, all gargantuan in size. I combed through Zagat, the popular restaurant guide, and found restaurants praised for their all-you-can-eat salad bars and buffets, free refills, two-for-ones, and troughs of pasta, all of which customers consider a selling point, with entries touting "Godzilla-sized burgers," "the biggest subs in the city," and "food piled high on the plate."

By the end of the summer, I had a big fat binder, my own "portion museum." It showed comparisons of cup, drink glass, and plate sizes; photos of obscenely large servings of pasta and meat; quotes from restaurant owners; and advertisements that lured customers with both bigger foods and bigger deals. My findings: The foods we buy today are often two to three times, even five times, larger than when they were first introduced into the marketplace.

portion shockers . . .

• Pizza pies were 10 inches in diameter back in the 1970s. Today Pizza Hut offers the Full House XL Pizza, a 16-inch pie. Little Caesars sells the Big! Big! Pizza, with the large measuring 16 to 18 inches with a slogan that says: "Bigger is better!" Both Pizza Hut and Little Caesars have discontinued the 10-inch pie.

• 7-Eleven stores started selling 12- and 20-ounce sodas in the early 1970s. By 1988 they were selling the 64-ounce Double Gulp, a half-gallon of soda marketed for one person.

• The famous Hershey chocolate bar weighed 0.6 ounce its first year on the market. Now the standard bar weighs 1.6 ounces, almost three times its original weight. Other sizes include the 2.6-, 4-, 7-, and 8-ounce bars. M&M/Mars increased the size of several of their most popular chocolate candy bars four times since 1970.

• The most popular burger places have all increased the size of their hamburgers: Burger King's original hamburger weighed 3.9 ounces, which included the bun and all. Today's Burger King burger is 4.4 ounces; the Whopper Junior is 6 ounces; and the Double Whopper is 12.6 ounces. McDonald's also started out with a pretty small patty—1.6 ounces precooked—but has upped it to the Double Quarter Pounder with 8 ounces, five times more meat. Wendy's, the chain that asked the famous question, "Where's the beef?" answered it with a triple-patty burger with 12 ounces of meat.

• Even diet food has grown in size; in the mid-1990s, Weight Watchers introduced Smart Ones, with larger portion sizes, and Lean Cuisine offered Hearty Portions, a heftier frozen dinner, with 100 more calories. The irony of diet food that advertised bigger sizes with more calories seems lost in the diet industry.

• At Starbucks the Short cup of coffee, at 8 ounces, is no longer on the menu. The smallest size is Tall, a 12-ounce cup that is nearly twice as big as what used to be considered a regular cup of coffee. Other sizes include the 16-ounce Grande and the 20-ounce Venti.

• When Chef America added 10 percent more filling to its microwave sandwich Hot Pockets while keeping the price the same, sales increased by 32 percent.

• The number of new larger-size portion sizes has increased tenfold between 1970 and 2000.