News You Can Use
Portion Distortion
By Rena Sandberg
Maintaining a sensible weight and making good food choices are important for everyone, but especially for breast cancer patients. Research shows that overweight women have lower breast cancer survival rates as well as a greater probability of recurrence. So if you’re trying to drop a dress size or just stay healthy, it pays to be a smart label-reader.
Cheryl Wachtel, nutritionist at Trinitas Comprehensive Cancer Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, says that the first mistake people make when reading food labels is assuming that serving sizes don’t matter. “People don’t always stay true to the portion size listed on the label, and sometimes it takes more effort to understand what a portion size really is,” she says. The result: We may eat more than we need and consume a lot more calories than we think we do—and the pounds stay on.
Start by figuring out how many calories you need in
a typical day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a website that calculates this information based on your age, sex, height, weight and physical activity level. If you’re trying to lose weight, the site shows you how to cut calories and get more exercise. Now you’re ready to start looking at labels, making sure you’re staying within your calorie limit and eating the proper serving amounts.
Okay, so what is a “serving,” anyway? Look at the very top of the label, under “Nutrition Facts.” There you’ll see the serving size and the number of servings in the container. A can of soup typically has two servings; a large bag of pretzels, six; a frozen apple pie, eight.
The next line on the label tells you how many calories are in an individual serving. The more servings you eat, the more calories you take in. A single one-ounce serving of potato chips might have only 190 calories, but if you polish off an entire six-ounce bag, the total skyrockets to 1,140. Look at the single-serving calorie count even for foods that sound healthy. One bran muffin might have more calories than two individual packets of instant oatmeal.
The FDA has an interactive online guide to label reading at their site. The MyPyramid site even shows you how to estimate healthy serving sizes for products like meat and fresh vegetables that don’t have food labels. For instance, a 2- to 3-ounce serving of meat, poultry or fish is the equivalent of a deck of cards; a cup of fruit is roughly the same size as a tennis ball; a 1-ounce pancake should be a little smaller than a CD. (Keep that in mind the next time you order a heaping stack.)
