HHS HealthBeat (April 29, 2009)

How much did you eat?

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

It’s easy to guess wrong about how much you should eat, and eat too much. It’s called portion distortion.

At Vanderbilt University, Russell Rothman had patients at a primary care clinic dole out what they thought should be one serving of common foods such as pasta and ground beef.

[Russell Rothman speaks] "Portion inaccuracy was very common. And for individual food items, as much as half the patients were inaccurate in estimating what standard portion sizes should be."

And Rothman says people with low literacy were about twice as likely as people with high literacy to get serving sizes wrong.

Rothman suggests measuring serving sizes – and if the restaurant portion looks too big,  take half the meal home.

The study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: May 7, 2011