In another thread, there was mention of Portion Size and Portion Distortion. I’ve been aware of this for some time – the “Muffins” you get at many bakeries and doughnut shops are outrageously huge, and the portion sizes at many restaurants are excessive.
But one thing that’s always bugged me is the “portion size” of bagels. For instance, from this site we get:
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_3_2x_Portion_Control.asp
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 3-inch diameter bagel in my life. Bagel-shop bagels and supermarket bagels have both been 4" - 4.5" ever since I first saw them in the 1960s. It’s hard for me to think of a 3" bagel as “Normal”. Have I just grown up and lived in regions of hypertrophic bagels? I recall that when I took my cross-country trip back in 1980, I was able to get bagels everywhere in the US*. Not one of them was as small as 3".
*I might not have been able to get GOOD bagels, but I could get some manner of doughnut-shaped roundbread calling itself a “Bagel”. For the record, you can get GREAT bagels in New York City, Rochester, N.Y., and Boston. Back then, at least, you wouldn’t get a particularly good one in the Intermountain West, Like Salt Lake City or Denver.
I’ve seen bagels that were only about three inches, but those were even marketed as “mini” bagels. I’m with you. I’ve never seen these pygmy bagels out in the wild.
I’ve never seen these pygmie bagels either out in the wild, and damn if I’m only going to eat just half of a “normal” sized bagel. By the by I don’t go to Dunkin Donuts anymore either unless it’s just for a coffee for the very reason that everything is made for Shrek sized folk.
But even if you eat half of a “normal” bagel you’re overdoing it, by the rules of Portion Sizing. Assuming a baghel is a perfect cylinder, with no hole in the center (which is pretty close for a lot of those bagels – they frequently seem to have the hole closed up by the expanded dough). a 4-4.5" diameter bagel has twice the volume of a 3" diamter bagel (assuming both are 1" thick), and therefore about four serving sizes!
It’s funny. Sometimes I look at the serving sizes and note that in a regular meal or a snack, I eat two or three servings. I should try an experiment where I break everything down into one serving size and eat only that in a meal/snack.
Why? Remember, looking at the food pyramid, that you’re supposed to have multiple servings of some food groups with each meal - otherwise how could you get the 6-11 servings of grains per day?
The problem isn’t with a portion of something that contains more than a single serving - it’s when you mistake such a portion for that single serving. If you consider a bagel as the grain portion of a meal, even the 4-4.5" bagel isn’t that extravagant. But people should be aware of how their food does fit into a healthy (or unhealthy, as the case may be) diet.
Now, I grant, that if you’re eating three or four servings of anything for a snack that is probably a problem, but as part of a meal, much less of a concern.
I’ve been eating bagels for over 50 years, the first 20 in New York, and I haven’t noticed any change in size. My current stock is at home, but looking at my ruler makes me thing 4 inches is about right.
I’ve seen mini-bagels, but only at hotels where they are put out as breakfast for conferences. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a store.
I’ve yet to see a bagel that’s only 3" across. Most seem to be roughly 4.5" or so.
However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a skinny Montreal-style bagel is probably closer to the proportions a bagel should be, as compared to an over-inflated jumbo twister bagel.
I nearly keeled over in shock when I ordered a bagel with cream cheese in an NYC deli a couple of years ago and the guy behind the counter handed me what looked like a blimp spread with a solid inch of cream cheese (okay, I exaggerate… but the damn thing was easily 6’ across) I ended up eating half for breakfast and half for lunch.
If no one’s ever seen a “standard” (not labeled as “mini”) bagel that’s 3" across, then where did these nutritionists get the notion that 3" constitutes a “standard” bagel?
I can buy a smaller bagel in the refrigerated section of my grocery store that’s about 3 1/2". These are diet bagels, however, and advertise themselves as 110 calories each. I don’t know how good these are compared to something from New York since I’ve never had a true NY bagel, but it satisfies my bagel cravings fine.
I can’t say I’ve seen much inflation in size of the average bagel either.
When I first started making and eating bagels back in the 70’s, we always bought Lender’s…and they were 3 inches or thereabouts. And they marketed mini-bagels that were smaller. Then I started buying bagels in bakeries, and at places like Bruegger’s, and Einstein, and they were huge! Now even the bagels in the grocery are huge. I saw a bag of mini-bagels the other day and realized they were the size of the original Lenders’ bagels…the normal size ones…3 inches. When I was actually making my own bagels, they all were about three inches, too. So they do, and did, exist…maybe not in New York, but my dad was from the Bronx and never complained or laughed at the tiny bagels we were buying back then.
It is that way with most everything though. When was the last time you bought a steak that was the size of a deck of playing cards instead of a 16 oz piece of meat that easily encompasses 3 servings? Hell, even popsicles and other things like that often come with individually wrapped 2 or more serving sets. And when is the last time you and two coworkers decided to split a package of mini-donuts from the vending machine since that package of 6 tiny donuts is 3 servings?
How the hell are people supposed to determine what is an appropriate size serving when it is so difficult to find any food sold, packaged, etc in a single serving size?
My complaint isn’t that one bagel constuitutes several “portion sizes” – that is indeed the case with many things.
It’s that nutritionists talk about a “standard” 3" bagel, when such a thing seems not to have been the norm. Steak can be cut into different sizes, as can other comodities. But bagels are – to use physics terminology – quantized. It’s as if nutritionists were talking about apples as if your garden-variety apple measured 1" across.
I would hazard a guess that they are referring to the 3" lenders frozen bagels, as they are [or similar frozen brands] are readily available in pretty much any grocery store rather than a bagel shop [which Podunk Kansas may not happen to have.]
I know as a diabetic I have very specific amounts of nutritional building blocks to arrange in specific meal/snack times during the day to optimize the way my body processes them. So that mongo bagel is 6 servings of carb? I cant do 4 servings of carb in a single meal…let alone half my daily carbs for breakfast.
I went to the freezer and measured a Montreal style thin-as-I’ve-seen them-commercially bagel: 4 inches across at the widest point (they are hand made, I believe) and a 1.5 inch hole in the centre. And I got them at a specialty bagel shop, and they are the smallest I’ve seen excepting the ‘cocktail’ sized ones.
BTW-I went to the Tim Horton’s site (I will not link because the bastards use audio) and they report their ‘everything bagel’ has 280 calories per serving, but I note they don’t categorically state that 1 bagel is a serving size…
