Digging Right In

There is a difference between a portion and a serving even though many people consider them the same. However, they are not synonymous and that fallacy can cause many people to overeat.  We will abbreviate the AHA site here:

• A portion is the amount of something you eat that aligns with your personal dietary needs and goals.
• A serving is the amount of something that is suggested as commonly consumed by everyone based on the USDA’s Nutrition label.

Seems simple? How much you choose to eat vs what the suggested amount is for an item but unfortunately, it isn’t simple. Packaging, marketing, and labeling are focused on serving size and not portion size. Even the AHA will interchange the two in their writing which re-enforces the challenges of the meaning of a serving size. 

Why Does That Matter?

That messaging leads many of us on low-calorie budgets to have frustrating choices between over-consumption or wasted food. Why is that? The reason that is a challenge is that serving sizes are not tied to what we need for our DRI. 

According to the FDA: By law, serving sizes must be based on the amounts of foods and beverages that people are actually eating, not what they should be eating.

As people’s consumption changes, the serving size changes with it. As the serving size changes, the packaging may need to change with it. According to the FDA, this leads to overconsumption. For example, we used to drink 8 oz of soda. We now, as a population, usually consume 12. How did that happen? 

The best way to answer that is by understanding marketing, eating trends, human motivation, economies of scale, availability of products, business, affluence, health trends, etc. We feel that is outside of the scope of this post. While we feel there is a salient thread that runs through this topic, it is only a set of hunches. For now, knowing the correlation between serving size and population generalizations should be enough to make us think about stopping using serving as a size.  

Portions over Servings FTW

One of the most challenging things is learning what the portion size of something is vs the serving size. If you are like us, it is a letdown to see how much less a portion of something is than its serving size. There is a silver lining to less is more we will get to. Right now, let’s talk about how to reset your visual expectations. 

A big challenge when moving from serving size is defining what it looks like so you can recognize it. What irks us is most times that information and visual representation come with opinions on ‘healthy’ alternatives. Yes, we all want to be healthy but change isn’t so simple as snapping our fingers. 

The reason it irks us is the fact that we are already taking something away when we go from servings to portions. We know through experiences that not everyone can change everything at once. To us, this is one of the reasons people who want to reduce their body size may fail to change or ride a diet rollercoaster. I know I can lose weight and eat fried chicken. Whether what we eat is healthy or not is open to interpretation but I know I didn’t cheat on my goals by doing it. 

Let us climb down from our little soap box and get back to the visualizing portion sizes which is much more helpful. We found a good way to visualize portions from the British Heart Foundation which is based on a specific calorie per day calorie budget. No matter what your goal is, this gives you a great visual guide. Eating more, eating less, eating healthy or not, here is a visual of a portion based on a calorie count. You can do the math for your needs.

With Every Cloud

Ah, yes, the benefits of knowledge. By using portion over serving size, we can more accurately buy food. Looking at your plate in a restaurant you can decide how much you need and take home. For us, this increased knowledge has had a direct impact on our food and restaurant budget. It has also made it much easier to stay on a calorie budget as we package our food accordingly. 

When we know what a portion is to us, we can buy it in bulk and then portion it into containers. This is why vacuum sealing became important to us. Restaurant meals now also generally produce a second take-home meal. If the single serving size is too big of a portion, say a 20 oz bottle of soda, we opt for something smaller. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed why we tightened up our terminology around portions and servings. Serving Size is a terrible way to understand what you need to eat for your body goals. You are essentially tying yourself to the rest of the general population’s eating habits. Not only are you tied to it, but you are adding to it by positive reinforcements as a buyer in the market. You do you is always what we preach. We believe it is hard for you to do you if you are tied to everyone else’s body goals and calorie needs. 

The post Here Is How Serving Size Lies To Us first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Why We ended up Wasting so Much

We needed to have a diverse menu stored at home to stop using restaurants. This created many challenges. We had always done some level of home cooking. It has changed over the years. It started with basics then became creating dishes from magazines like Bon Appétit, Cook’s Illustrated, or Food & Wine.

As we tried cooking different dishes, we realized that when the ingredients in recipes hit 4 or 5 ‘exotic’ ingredients we had a lot of wasted food. These ingredients may be everyday items to some people and cultures. What we found there was only so much fish sauce or garbanzo bean flour we could put to use day to day.  This resulted in a routine purge of our cupboards, pantry, and fridge every 6 months. If it was past the use-by date, it went out through the disposal or garbage.

The Labels Don’t Mean It’s Bad

This was absolutely an incorrect use of that label. In our case, we were doubling our waste. We had a recreational property that we wanted to keep food in stock as well. If we didn’t cook ourselves we were relying on a couple of local restaurants and eating from the local gas station hot case. Based on our calorie budget, we wanted better options. We decided to do our research.

The USDA provides the following information:

• A “Best, if Used By/Before” date, indicates when a product will be of the best flavor or quality.  It is not a purchase or safety date.
• A “Sell-By” date tells the store how long to display the product for sale for inventory management.  It is not a safety date. 
• A “Use-By” date is the last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality. It is not a safety date except for when used on infant formula as described below.
• A “Freeze-By” date indicates when a product should be frozen to maintain peak quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.

The USDA also makes two specific callouts around eggs and infant formula. These are nuanced regulations that don’t apply to the bulk of the foods we eat. In terms of baby formula, the Use-By date indicates that it still contains the nutrients it should.  As an FYI, there are also non-federal requirements by some states on labeling eggs ‘Sell-By’ or ‘Expiration’. Neither are pertinent to the discussion of food waste in our bigger picture.

Misunderstanding Leads to Waste

Retail and consumer waste is a real issue in the US. The number is a staggering 30-40% between retail and consumer. The entire distribution chain from source to consumer contributes to the waste. The factors that contribute to the waste include everything from spoilage to culling of blemished items. Let’s spin this another way.

Let’s say we consumers waste 10% of our food. That means we are throwing away 10% of the money we have spent on it. At the time of writing this, the average consumer spend on groceries was above $250 a week which is over $13,000 a year. If we waste 10% of what we buy we are effectively throwing away $1,300 a year in groceries alone because the number doesn’t include eating out. The true cost of the waste is more than financial. The true cost includes environmental costs such as transportation, water, feed, and processing along with animals (if in your diet) are wasted. That is a huge issue for a population as large as the US.

We Went Old School

This learning led us to change our food habits. We learned to perform a visual and sniff test rather before we pitch it in the trash as recommended by the USDA. There are some things I don’t trust like milk but most foods will let you know they are on the downward slide. Commercially canned foods such as say, Baked Beans, may be fine well past their best-by date. Cuts of beef may be aged for up to 4 weeks which is a longer time than your typical use-by date.

For home-produced foods, such as canning or fermenting, it becomes more complicated. Some items will not put off any sign they are dangerous. That we will address in another post. We will also discuss how we learned to maximize storage and efficiently use it in another post as well.

Your Money, Your Safety Choice

The takeaway here is that the US does not regulate food through these labels. Labeling provides no real safety nets for our food. By making informed decisions, and using basic sensory information (Does it smell bad?) you can cut your waste which leads to decreased spending.  

People want hard and fast safety rules but the USDA and others simply don’t provide them.  If you are in an ‘at risk’ group such as very young or old, you may not feel like taking the chance. With what we have learned, we will take our chances by using our senses instead of dates.

The post The Simple Truth Of Best And Use By first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Portion or Serving Size, which is the correct way to discuss what you eat? We use portion size because there is an established convention of serving and serving size. Portions are a way to capture what we eat, not the serving size. We discuss why serving size is based on a different calorie per day intake than is currently used here.

Why is it so Small?

I have a frozen lasagna I like. I also love a certain brand of pot pie. Both of these items were in the frozen food aisle at our local grocery store. As we became more conscious of our goals with our calories, we started reading labels. As we alluded to in an earlier post, they weren’t what they seemed to be. Becoming more curious we started some experiments.

We bought and cooked one of the lasagnas. We then proceeded to portion it out based on what the company called a serving size. It was tiny when compared to what we were used to eating. It was also tiny compared to what I was used to at my favorite restaurants. We had the same issue with the pot pie. 

You Can’t Eat That Junk Then Right…Maybe?

That means we stopped eating it, correct? Not the lasagna. The lasagna serving size was simple to adjust the portion size by cutting it differently. It did make the pot pie a non-starter as it wasn’t sharable. This led us to another understanding. The nutrition label changes based on how much you eat. If you aren’t eating the recommended serving size, you aren’t getting what is on that label. 

In the case of the lasagna, we simply did some math and adjusted to our meal size. Their serving size was about 330 calories. We wanted 500 per meal. That was 1.5 times their serving size. That meant everything on the label went up by 50%. If there were 20g of protein per serving, our 500-calorie portion had 30g. If it had 1000 grams of sodium, that went up to 1,500 grams for our portion size. 

Recipes Have Serving Sizes Too

We also started looking at the recipes we were cooking. Most recipes online have the number of servings they make, the calories in them, and a rough nutrition breakdown.  We got downright geeky about it and started to weigh our portions for a while. Think that is a little too far? It was one of the most important exercises we ever did to get an idea of what we were eating.

If you are staying on a calorie budget, spend 2 or 3 weeks weighing portions. Knowing what 4 oz of chicken or beef looks like is important. Love eating mashed potatoes? Weigh out a portion of them to see what it looks like. Gravy is calorie dense so it is best to know what ½ cup of gravy looks like. 

No matter if you are losing, gaining, or trying to maintain your weight it is very difficult without knowing portion size. Because we aren’t selling a new diet or a miracle pill we won’t say it is easy. It is a pain in the backside to do this. Once you do it you will never look at food shows, restaurants, and even what you make the same. 

Go Forth and Feed!

Once you understand portion sizes, the calories, and the nutrition in them, you are empowered to control your eating. You can now make more informed choices. Want a protein boost, you know what that looks like on your plate. Carb loading for an event, you know how much pasta that is. At a company party, you have an idea of the difference between the tuna sandwich and the roast beef sandwich.

In this post, we covered how to start understanding portion sizes. We have also covered why understanding them is so important to weight management. Lastly, we have covered how nutrition is based on portion size and why changing that size changes the nutritional value of that meal. You should now feel empowered to make decisions based on your needs.

The post Serving Size Is Not The Best Guide first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We are constantly bombarded with pseudo-facts and misinformation. As consumers, we care about product tradeoffs so we can make informed decisions. The domain of food is challenging as we can’t compare two items, even with the same name, in terms of calories. In this post, we will give you some ideas on how to compare disparate but similar items. 

First, Were Sticking to Calories

This post does not pick on any company or food choice. Our purpose is to raise awareness of the disparity of claims and perceptions of serving sizes versus what is actually on nutritional data or labels. As a result, we leave debating the nutritional value of any type of food to others. Whether you choose fast or organic vegan or anything in between is up to you.

Incongruencies of Agency Goals

First, let’s note a difference. Nutrition labels use the FDA 2,000 calories a day which was the old standard of measuring the amount of calories the average adult needs. That is the overall generalization for how much the average person needs to consume a day. The USDA is now using MyPlate. You may recognize it to be similar to the BMR work we discussed. The plan also moves away from the food pyramid to what is considered a visualization of what should be on our plates. The issue is the calories don’t match.

Because this is not a post on nutrition, it doesn’t help or hurt what we are going to discuss. We bring it up as another point of how people are set up to fail through packaging. When you read a label and it says serving size containing x, y, and z you expect it to be accurate. If there is 30% of your daily protein in the serving, it should be 30%. If your calorie intake needs to be 2,400 calories, not 2,000, then it is only 24% of your needed protein.

The more we learned, the less trust we had in labels and experts. There were simply too many incongruencies across all of them. All the incongruencies pointed to the same problem. It is about you as a person and your goals and you have to be an informed consumer.

A Serving May Only be Part of a Package

Serving size is where many hidden calories lie. You will see a package advertising that says only 100 or 150 calories per serving. But what is the serving size? Bags of chips, crackers, and individually packed items are usually the foods you see this on. In one package of Milton crackers we like, the serving size was only 2 crackers for 70 calories.  Comparing this with Gardetos we also like, it was 150 calories for a 1/2 cup.

You may ask why does that matter and what point are we making? By logging our calories we quickly learned our expectations of portion sizes were way off. When we buy a small bag of chips, rarely do we eat half and leave the rest for another day. I don’t think I have ever eaten just 2 crackers. As the Lay’s potatoes chip commercial used to claim ‘I bet you can’t eat just one’. We found truth in that statement.

What you Drink Impacts your Calories

Similarly, let’s talk about alcohol. We like to drink beer so we budget it into our calories. Calories from beer are based on the alcohol content of that beer. When we choose a can of Coors Light or Bud Light, that is roughly 100-120 calories per can. If we go out to a pub or restaurant and have a pint of something like an IPA that may jump to 300 or more.  If I enjoy 3 IPAs by the fire some Saturday night that could be 900 calories. Realizing that you can choose which is best for your calorie budget. 

Reading the Tea Leaves of Menus

You may ask, why a meal at a restaurant may range from 600-1200 calories. The reason is that it includes all the possible combinations of sizes, sides, sauces, or drink choices. Let’s look at two well-known chains. Both of them do a great job of having nutrition labels available but they also both can be confusing. Understanding the total calories of what you have eaten is challenging.

Breaking it Down

By Ingredients

  A Subway Chicken Bacon Ranch 6” on multi-grain bread in 530 calories. Let’s add Pepper Jack cheese and some Creamy Sriracha dressing to it. That bumps the 6” to  620 calories. Bread is all within 10-20 calories of each other so we can have it on anything we like with it. Eat the whole thing like I used to? That would be roughly 1240 calories excluding drinks, chips, cookies, or anything else. Great if you have the budget for it, bad if you don’t.

By Meal Choices

 In contrast, a McDonald’s Big Mac, Medium Fries, and Medium Coke weigh in at roughly 1130 calories when you include ketchup. Switch that to small fries and Diet Coke and we are at 830 calories. That is 210 more than the Subway 6” but less than the 410 less than the 12”. What this starts to show is how important portion size is in setting a calorie budget. We will touch on that in a later post as well.

But They are Consistent

 While fast food has been villainized by many, the reality is, their whole goal is consistency. What you order at one restaurant will be the same as another calorie-wise. Consistency is an advantage of eating these places which we will discuss in another post. In terms of nutrition and taste, well, those are not the subject of this blog. Our goal is strictly around weight management for now. 

But We Only Eat ‘Healthy’ Food

Of course, we are all health conscious so many turn away from processed foods. We want fruit juice and a healthy snack like pistachios instead of all this booze and fast food. Maybe we can add in half a cup of  2% cottage cheese. Based on calories sourced through Google, a cup of OJ is roughly 140 calories. We also found a cup of pistachios is roughly 690 and the cottage cheese is 100 calories. At 930 calories that is about on par with our Big Mac Meal. Whether it is healthier or a better choice is up to others.

Learning this made me grumpy because I love nuts. Pistachios, walnuts, almonds, peanuts (yes, not a true nut, but close enough). I could go eat them all day. To meet my personal goals I had to change how many I ate. I didn’t stop eating them, just the amount and frequency. An aside to think about. Candy bars were marketed as a meal replacement during the Depression. Nutritionally maybe not but you can see it from a pure calorie point of view. Mr. Goodbar, which contained peanuts was marketed as a cheap ‘protein-rich’ meal.

One more for you salad enthusiasts.  A Caesar salad with 4 oz of grilled chicken and a roll can come in at a hefty 760 calories. The salad can be as high as 470 calories, the chicken 170, and a roll of roughly 120. Add butter to that roll and we are in the range of a Big Mac Meal.

Don’t Take Anything at Face Value

The takeaway here is to trust nothing. There is a lot of misinformation out there. Managing your weight is more about understanding what calories come from what. You are the person empowered to make changes in your eating habits. Just because someone says it’s only 100 calories per serving or is ‘healthy’ doesn’t mean it is what you think it is. 

 The realization of where these hidden calories were was ultimately life-changing for us. It was frustrating to learn we had been wrong in our approach to our calorie budget. It is this type of information that allows us to stay on track through informed decisions. That is why we feel it is so important to share these types of things with others.

The post The Surprise Ways Calories Can Hide first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.