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Since Boots has been the first to offer the art of offering a sandwich, a snack and a drink at a great price, the UK is pbadionate about the 'meal' formula. Every week, twice a week, a third of us enter a supermarket and give us £ 3 in exchange for this holy trinity of food for lunch.
Yet even if the "agreement" part explains itself, nothing is what seems to be the "meal". After eating a chicken and bacon sandwich, a small package of Cool Original Doritos and a Naked Smoothie, you may feel that you have eaten a meal: lunch. In fact, you just ate 5.8 servings of food.
According to the back of a package of Doritos 55 g, 30 g constitute a portion. This means that just over half of your snack for lunch, you should wrap the rest of the bag and keep it for another day. A bottle of 360ml Naked Smoothie – in a treacherous act of betrayal to those who have already thought "Ooh, continue then, I will be healthy today" – contains between two or three portions of the drink.
The more you examine the supermarket food portion suggestions, the more things get confusing. If you want to Smarties, you should count 16 and – it's not too late to look off – a serving of Cadbury Fingers equals four cookies. When it comes to microwavable prepared meals, you are usually supposed to eat only half of it. Anyone weighing the recommended 30 grams of cereal will be desperate to see how hard it is to cover the bottom of the bowl.
So, why are the service suggestions so different from what we actually eat? This does not help that the food we eat has changed – a 2016 report by Consensus Action on Salt and Health has revealed (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the salt content of some common foods has increased in recent years. six years. And while some of our foods are getting worse for us, the health guidelines encourage us to reduce them. In 2015, the World Health Organization had recommended that simple sugars – those found in fruit juices or processed foods and beverages – account for less than 10% of our daily caloric intake and ideally, half. In the United Kingdom, at the time of the recommendation, the average intake of adults was closer to 17%.
Still, this does not explain why the service suggestions are often so strange, such as a bottle of Innocent smoothie of 330 ml set at 2.2 servings, or the recommended portion of a 22 gram Galaxy chocolate bar. We are supposed to reduce the number of unhealthy foods, of course, but how come manufacturers have made confusing recommendations instead of just serving healthy-sized foods?
The explanation may lie in the laws on food labeling. Since 2014, the EU Consumer Information Regulation (EU FIC) requires companies to provide nutritional information "back of the bag" per 100 ml or 100 g. This allows consumers to compare two similar products. However, the regulation also states that brands may also voluntarily add their own "per serving" values to the nutrition tables.
"Industry standards have been set for the portion sizes of certain foods, such as cereals, but the government has no standards set for portion size labeling," explains Lucy Chambers, senior scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation. "There is a debate as to whether the portion size on the package should represent what people actually consume or what they should consume, and it is unclear which of these two types information supports better healthier choices. "
The government's recommendation for juice portion size is 150 ml, which explains how a bottle of 330 ml smoothie can contain 2.2 drinks. But for other foods, for which portion size is not established by the government, brands depend on non-governmental organizations and health professionals for advice. For reference, many use a 2002 photographic guide to food portion sizes created by the Department of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries. Service suggestions are therefore not totally illicit, and the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs warns that misleading labels (such as claiming that a pizza serves 30 people) can be related to commercial standards.
Still, even if businesses do not push things to the extreme, portion size rules and regulations still pose problems, says dietician Luci Daniels. In 2013, Daniels helped draft a report from the British Heart Foundation, Portion Distortion, which claimed that food companies needed to make changes to ensure that "portion sizes are standardized." , clearly labeled and easy to understand. Yet companies continue to set their own sizes, perhaps because it allows them to hide the insalubrity of their products.
"It sounds better if you state that a serving of chips, chocolate or something else contains 100 calories rather than 200 calories," Daniels says. "The food industry may not be as open, honest and realistic as it could be." While a small 300 ml bottle of Tropicana – the one you'd buy with a good meal – looks like a single portion, a note at the bottom of the Nutrition Chart page says, "This package contains two portions." "People watch the calories, but they probably will not look at the very small font that says 15g, or five pieces, or whatever," says Daniels. "It's wrong, because it's very misleading."
Strange service suggestions pose other problems when they are used in conjunction with traffic light labeling, a voluntary system introduced in 2013. These color-coded labels on the front of packaging indicate at a glance if a product contains low (green), medium (amber) or high (red) levels of your recommended daily amount of calories, fat, saturated fat , salt and sugar. Although the color code on the labels is based on 100g or 100ml of the product, the nutritional information (such as fat grams or calories) is based on the portion size. This means that the percentage that fat or salt contributes to your recommended intake is also defined per serving. On a pack of 10 sweet Sainsbury mini donuts, the traffic light label refers to a single donut; on a package of Asda pork badtail sausages, the label refers to "every 1/9" of a package.
"The calories per half-bottle or quarter-chocolate or half-bag of chips are sometimes not very useful or big enough for people to know that if they have the whole bottle or bag, they get it. two or three times or five times the calories, "says Daniels.
But hang in there, is not it the problem that we are all greedy guts, eating a fifth of a pack of badtail sausages while a ninth will do the trick? The 2013 Daniels report found that many portion sizes had increased significantly from those recommended in the 1990s: a portion of garlic bread is now 30% larger, while biscuits average 17% bigger. So does not it make sense for the front of an Oreos package to provide nutritional information for a single cookie? Yet while it is up to individuals to control their eating habits, a psychological phenomenon called "polarization unit" explains why we are forced to eat a whole packet of chips or drink an entire bottle of smoothie, even though technically we should only have half. .
"What we eat in a given meal depends to a large extent on what we have in front of us," says Paul Rozin, a psychologist who published an article on unit bias in 2006. Rozin and his colleagues found that whatever their size. a particular item is, for example, a sandwich or ice cream, we tend to think of it as a portion. "We tend to eat one of the things, if it's a pretty big thing," says Rozin.
Rozin says, "If the timing is right and you like a stack of food, you'll eat it, 15% more or 15% less food," which means businesses probably have to badume their responsibilities and take responsibility. the packages reflect their portions. If a bottle of 360 ml smoothie contains 2.2 servings, why not just sell a serving in a smaller bottle?
When asked about this, a spokesman for Innocent Drinks said his bottles were re-sealable and that his recommendations were in line with the UK's five-day guidelines. "We are aware that the size of the recommended portion is smaller than the size of the bottle. However, we think it's the right size for our drinkers and we provide all the information that drinkers need so that they can get their own idea about what they want. to drink. And having a bigger bottle is more durable than having two smaller bottles, "they say.
According to Rozin, another option is for companies to delimit portions more clearly to try to convince us to overcome bias or unit bias. If a package of Smarties declared in big letters rather than small, that we should only eat 16, our behavior could change accordingly.
"We had another study where we had people eating a tube of potato chips [like Pringles] watching a movie If we put a red every tenth, we reduce their consumption a bit, because you basically give them the signal that it was part of it, "Rozin explains.
The recommended portions can help us take care of our health, but for now, they are not in the best position to really change our habits. The fact that they are often so shocking when a consumer reads the label (four chocolate fingers! Four!) Reveals how ineffective they are – it can only shock because the packaging is so much larger than the portion. Yet, as long as things stay as they are, it's up to us to count our Smarties, weigh our Galaxy squares, and save 0.2 ml of smoothie for another day.
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