Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/06/my-time-magazine-op-ed-we-are-still-confused-about-calories/
While I was in Israel last week, Time Magazine published an op-ed it had invited me to write. Here it is.
Even in ‘healthy’ foods, calories can tick up fast
Nutrition professor that I am, if I could teach just one thing to the American public, it is this: Larger portions have more calories.
Please don’t laugh.
If we all understood this, the United States would not have an obesity problem. And the recent revelation that places like Chipotle and Panera serve meals with more calories than McDonald’s would surprise nobody. We would realize the former’s “health” aura blinds people. But this basic rule applies to those places, too.
We would also, strangely, thank McDonald’s for at least one thing: It limits portion sizes. It’s easy to pile on calories by asking for a little more of this, then a refill of that—without realizing that the calories surpass those in McDonald’s meals.
It’s not easy to understand calories. They are not intuitive because they’re abstract. They cannot be seen, tasted or smelled, and are extraordinarily difficult to count accurately, even for scientists. My colleague Lisa Young, author of The Portion Teller, once asked an entry-level nutrition class to guess the calories in 8-ounce and 64-ounce soft drinks. We didn’t expect students to know that an 8-ounce Coke has 100 calories—but we certainly expected them to multiply whatever they guessed by eight for t…