Bigger portions packing on the pounds
It seems like people either don't realize how bad super-sized portions are for them, or they just don't care. But I'm banking on "they don't know." And I even have a study to back me up.
Recently a group of researchers in New York surveyed a group of fast food eaters, and asked them to guess how many calories were in different portion sizes of different foods. And boy, were they off!
When it came to the smaller sizes, the diners were somewhat close, generally guessing that a smaller size had about 100 fewer calories less than it actually did.
But when it came to the larger sizes, the average guess was more than 500 calories off. That's huge!
And we're not talking about 500 calories of healthy omega-3 fats and protein here. We're talking about unhealthy transfats and grease, which is mucking up the arteries of the very people who don't seem know what it is they're eating.
All those calories in one sitting of these fake man-made "Frankenfoods" from fast food joints wreak havoc on the body. They provoke the production of large amounts of free radicals, nasty little rogue oxygen molecules that run around your body damaging all types of tissues and clearly associated with increased risk of the usual bad actors - heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer. And a lot of calories you don't need just get stored as fat.
If ever there was a case for government intervention in our nation's fast food habits, this is it. Because while no one can stop people from eating it, there should be much firmer rules about providing nutritional information to consumers. After all, the ingredients of the food we eat are just as important as the ingredients of any drug we take into our body.
