Restaurant portion sizes are huge—about 2 to 3 times larger than the food labels list as a serving. Even well-trained nutrition professionals tend to underestimate the amount of fat and calories in restaurant foods.
Food is abundant in the
Food advertisements promote mostly foods high in calories, fat, or sugar. Only 2% of food advertising is for fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans, combined.Food advertisements subtly (and not so subtly) encourage overeating and eating when you aren’t hungry. For example, one ad from Quaker advises parents to feed their children chewy granola bars to keep them quiet. The text reads, “Kids talking too much? Give ’em a Chewy. Chewy stops the chatter.” Other familiar lines brought to you by the food industry include, “don’t just stand there—eat something,” and “once you pop...you can’t stop.”
Modern conveniences like remote controls, elevators, car washes, washing machines, leaf blowers, and drive-through windows at fast-food restaurants all mean less physical activity. The Dallas Morning News tallied up the number of calories a person could burn if he replaced several “convenient” activities, such as driving through a “drive-through” window, with their more active counterparts, such as walking into the store. Together, they added up to 8,800 calories worth of missed physical activity opportunities each month, or the amount of activity needed to burn off 2.5 pounds of fat.