WHAT THE HECK IS A SERVING?

What the heck IS a serving? Picture this, it's morning and a five year old girl comes down to the breakfast table. Mom pours the little girl a bowl of cereal, a half a cup of cereal because she saw on the box that a serving is a half a cup. Now dad comes down to the breakfast table,  dad is 6 feet 5 inches tall and works a construction job, and he pours himself a half cup of cereal just like the box says. What's wrong with this picture!

How did the cereal manufacturer arrive at  a half a cup is a serving for everyone? No one knows, it's a mystery, it's their little secret and they're not telling. To further compound things, the government's definition of a serving and the manufacturer's definition of a serving is different. What? That's right, but the last I read, the government is going to work on matching up definitions.

The cynical Melting Man in me thinks that the serving size is determined from the amount of a product equal to a low number of calories so that we will buy the food. In other words, it's just another part of the advertising and has nothing to do with nutrition. When you look at the label the first thing that jumps out at you is the calorie amount. Big, bold numbers. So we buy the cookies thinking to ourselves that a reasonable serving of cookies is only 100 calories. What we don't realize is that the cookie maker's definition of a serving of cookies is "a crumb". That's right, it's a little harder to find that serving size information on the label. The cookie maker determined how much of their product would be 100 calories, so that we wouldn't feel guilty about buying it, and that's how they came up with the serving size amount. Case in point: I was in the store the other day and passed a package of muffins, who doesn't like muffins...they're the healthy alternative to a cupcake, I picked up the package and looked at the label. The calorie count in these muffins was surprisingly low, and they looked delicious. I thought to myself, I could have one of these with coffee in the morning and still have enough calories left in the bank to spend on a good breakfast. BUT THEN, then I looked at the serving size, in wee small letters hidden on the label, it said:  Serving Size 1/3 of a muffin.  Who eats 1/3 of a muffin? I got so mad, I put it down. I was mad because they don't care that I'm trying to be a responsible consumer and that I'm working hard to lose weight , they don't care about my health, they just want to trick me into buying these muffins.

Yeah, no wonder we are all fat. When I was growing up we didn't have food labels, gyms to go to, exercise DVDs to watch,  diet food, low fat foods, whole grain foods, but yet after all that and many years later, we as a nation are fatter. It isn't all our fault.

So, I've determined that the manufacturer's serving size is just going to be a measure for me to determine how many calories of this product I'm going to eat. Some days I'll eat more of it, some days less.

Now, who knows what the heck a portion is?  :)