Portion Size, Then and Now

Portion Size, Then and Now is an article by Liz Monte on the froofy women website Divine Caroline. It has pretty pictures showing portion sizes twenty years ago versus portion sizes today.

Basically, the article is a rehash of your high school Health Education class. And that's it. Nothing too fancy, just straightforward facts to make you feel slightly smug about why you're slightly overweight. These are my favorite three quotes:

1) A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that Americans consume around 10 percent more calories than they did in the 1970s. Given no change in physical activity, this equates to around 200 extra calories per day, or 20 pounds a year.

2) When confronted with a 32-ounce drink for 99 cents versus a 44-ounce drink for ten cents more, the decision is easy. You’d have to be a sucker not to go big. But our ability to get the most out of our dollar doesn’t always serve us well. Value pricing, which gets us a lot more food or drink for just a little increase in price, makes sense from an economic standpoint, but is sabotage from a health standpoint.

3) People with the large size ate more than those with the medium size, regardless of how participants rated the taste of the popcorn.

In conclusion, I'm really hungry.



Runner up:
Some dude named Richard Watson is hawking his latest book. I know nothing about this book, except that it contains a cheeky extinction timeline. (And also, I'm going to go ahead and guess it's not by the deceased British Methodist Theologian Richard Watson.) The timeline has a solid mix of real events and fake future events. Can't wait until "getting lost" and "household chores" come true.(From The Kott, and LS via The Presurfer)