A true story at a restaurant:

Waiter: Here is your order of Vegetable Pasta, enjoy!
Customer: Um… I only ordered one dish to split with my wife.
Waiter: That is one order.
Customer: OK, I’ll just call a couple of my friends as well - this is enough for 4 people!
Waiter: [speechless]

This is increasingly a problem I see at restaurants and I am glad the Food and Drug Administration is finally voicing an official opinion on this matter. On 2nd June 2006, the FDA received the “Keystone Forum Report on Away-From-Home Foods (PDF)“. The opening lines of the summary of this report should send a chill down our spines:

Over the past two decades in the United States, obesity has become a public health crisis of epidemic proportions. At present, approximately 64% of all U.S. adults are overweight, including 30% who are obese. Overweight and obesity are associated with increased morbidity and mortality, and also exact significant economic costs. The medical expenses attributable to overweight and obesity are estimated to have reached as high as $92.6 billion per year—roughly 9.1% of total U.S. medical expenditures.

-Via Executive Summary of the Keystone Forum Report (PDF)

Based on this finding, the FDA reports that it is now urging restaurants (the primary “Away-From-Home food providers, not counting grandma and her third helpings at Thanksgiving!) to reduce portion sizes and also make it easier for consumers to know exactly what they are eating by providing them with nutrition information a la Nutrition Data.

With hamburgers, french fries and pizza the top three eating-out favorites, restaurants are in a prime position to help improve people’s diets, a government-commissioned report said yesterday.
…
The report encourages restaurants to shift the emphasis of their marketing to lower-calorie choices and include more such options on menus. In addition, restaurants could adjust portion sizes and the variety of foods available in mixed dishes to cut calories.

-Via Washington Post

The statistics are scary but the solution is simple. Control portions (heck - get smaller plates and pack up extra food for tomorrow’s lunch if that will help!). And restaurants can certainly help by making it much easier for us by reducing portions themselves.

And they have atleast one thing to gain by doing that: money saved on doggy bags!

Technorati Tags: health, fitness, FDA, portion control

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