Oh, okay. Better to just spout out stuff that you don’t know anything about and make people worry about potential health risks. Super.
You know, if your confidence in your own research and knowledge is sufficiently shaky that a chance remark on a message board (regarding GESTATIONAL DIABETES, not TYPE I OR TYPE II DIABETES) causes you great anxiety, then, well, there you are.
Returning to the topic at hand (in defiance of all tradition) I have to say that in my exerience portion sizes will vary hugely not just across countires and between various establishments, but also in terms of what people eat at various times of day and what people eat as a matter of course rather than as a treat.
The aforementioned teensy Italian breakfast is a good example - it would leave me ravenous by midday but the locals are fine with it. I would find the typical italian lunch a bit much, and I have never managed to cope with a seven-course Ialian feast, ever. I perceive Italians to eat a little bit more in total than I do, but of healthier food. Similarly, you get different distributions of meal sizes and types of food as you travel round.
The only country I have ever encountered where it seems to be assumed that every meal should be a serious attempt at death by eating is the US, where all portions seem to be huge, at all times, everywhere.
Having said that, Germany comes pretty close. A Wienerschnitzel or a schlachtplatte does not normally leave much room for dessert, or much energy left for anything other than whispered pleas for liver salts…
I find the quickest way to kill my appetite is to be presented with a very large portion of food ( especially chips or fries, for some strange reason). I suppose it’s the thought of having to plough through this large mound of food that puts me off it.
It know it must be psychological, but I enjoy my food when in comes in smaller portions. If I feel hungry after eating this, I can always go back for more.
It’s supply as well as demand.
In the USA, we taxpayers generously subsidize corn (zea maiz) production. Then we have cheap corn syrup to put into super-size soft drinks, and corn oil, and the corn itself which is much used for animal feed.
So sodas and hamburger (and other meats) are subsidized indirectly, and fast-food places and restaurants compete on portion size because the supplies don’t cost them so much.
Possible envious motivation by a California farm kid: nothing my family raises is subsidized. It’s all them midwest Senators with 10,000-acre corn farms.
Even in the line you quoted from me I said to judge the reliability for yourself. I have no invested interest in the topic and haven’t researched it accordingly. I mentioned that I had read a few articles about it is all.
If anyone, anywhere takes one or two statements from a forum dedicated to opinions as medical fact without doing their own research, then they get what they deserve. In this case, some people might stop drinking diet soda. Oh, the horror.
Taking your advice, I used Google Scholar (which I hadn’t previously known existed, thanks for the link) and found links that both support and decry the theory. Even the professionals don’t know for sure, and though none endorse it, none seem willing to dismiss it either.
Oh, and none of the studies I read about had anything to do with rats. They were testing humans with loaded yogurt or gum or pudding.
Another recent experience springs to mind: ordering a pastrami on rye from an eat-in deli in NYC. I knew already I’d get a big sandwich, but holy crap, this thing nearly gave us a pint of milk too. It was about four inches deep in pastrami, and it looked like a road accident. I got rid of about 3/4 of the meat, just about finished the sandwich (couldn’t touch the fries), then felt guilty and asked for a doggy bag, even though I had no fridge in the hotel room. Oh, and it came with pickles too.
My wife ordered a salami sandwich, which was of similar dimensions, and we dissected it. There were 23 layers of salami.
My dad, when he was working in Tennessee, said that on Monday he would order a turkey sub, take all but two of the slices out, Tupperware the rest and eat that with mayo on his own bread for the rest of the week.
I now feel a little embarrassed about American tourists visiting here, and ordering a ham sandwich or whatever, and finding that it has merely one bread-sized piece of ham in it. (A bit like when my Texan friend came to visit, and he ordered a Coke in my local café. It came to the table at room temperature. Quite correctly, he sent it back and asked for ice. Ten minutes later, the same Coke returned - still warm, but with one solitary ice cube floating in it. :o)
[Moderator Underoos on]If you wish to debate the merits/demerits of artificial sweeteners, do so elsewhere(Great Debates comes to mind).[/Moderator Underoos on]
Agreed. The portions I am presented with in Canadian restaurants are often unnecessarily big (and I am a big guy) but the portions in U.S. restaurants can border on the grotesque.
Two slices would be about right. And one slice of Swiss cheese.
There’s a place in Lancaster, CA called Crazy Otto’s. (Two places for the last several years, after Otto died.) Used to be that their breakfasts came with three eggs. a helping of butter-drenched hashbrowns the size of a typical paperback book and an two inches high, a thick ham steak (the kind with the bone) about six inches across on the short side, and three homemade buttermilk biscuits (for the UK: a like a scone, but not sweet) with sausage-and-bacon-and-ham gravy. As a teen I could eat half of it, and I’d take the rest home for later. In recent years (and it’s been several years since I’ve been there) they reduced the eggs and biscuits to two of each and the ham steak is slightly smaller. But it’s still an unholy amount of food. The only other place I’ve been to that served larger breakfasts (but not quite as tasty IMO as Otto’s) was Belaisle’s, which used to be on Harbor and Chapman a few miles South of Disneyland. They had cakes a foot high. Locally there’s Arlis’s. Meals almost as large as Otto’s, and you get a choice of three pancakes, or two biscuits with gravy.
Personally I’d prefer smaller portions. I’d be quite happy with a good croissant or a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. (And two pots of tea or a pot of coffee, of course. 
) Until I started this diet (which precludes carbohydrates) and have been trying to eat some breakfast every day, I typically would eat nothing until noon.
My wife was completely floored by the restaurant portions when we went to Boston last summer (I had a pretty hard time with them, myself). We quickly developed a strategy of finding something that looked small, and then splitting a single order between us.
On the other hand, we didn’t have the same problem in France. The meals were filling, but never ridiculously huge.
“Oh waiter, we’ll have the trout almondine and two forks.”
FWIW, I’m an American and am often incredulous at how large servings are, too. Maybe it’s gotten worse in recent years, or maybe it’s a regional difference. (Are servings smaller on the West Coast, where I grew up? I don’t know.)
You must not go to any of the American family casual chains – Bennigan’s, TGIFriday’s, Applebee’s, etc. – because all of them serve an absurd amount of food as regular meals. But, they do this because the food cost in a restaurant (especially one like those, that basically serve pre-prepped frozen chicken breasts and beef patties) is usually not the largest deciding factor in pricing. They can offer a lot of food to their customers and charge a little more for it and make their money that way. For example, if they cut the portions in half, they’d only be able to cut the prices by 30% or so, and their customers would go somewhere else to get something bigger.
Most of this is from talking with my brother and other industry workers I know, and I can’t think straight today because of a cold, but I hope that makes sense.
I can see how spiking your insulin response might have undesirable metabolic consequences, but you can’t gain weight without the energy calories provide. You can’t get something from nothing.
Being one of those in the minority with a high metabolism who are actually trying to gain weight, I’ve never much cared enough to learn about it. Was just reporting what I’d read.
Personally, I’m quite happy with American sized portions. In fact, I often finish off someone elses plate. I went to Canada not too long ago, and considering what I paid for the meal, I could have eaten another one and still have had room for dessert.
The idea is that ingesting something that tastes sweet makes your body produce insulin to deal with the incoming sugar. If the sweet taste was artificial sweetener then that sugar never arrives so the extra insulin drives down your blood sugar levels, making you feel hungrier than before and therefore eating more that you would have otherwise. So replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners means you put on weight, not take it off.
I’m neither supporting nor decrying this theory, just elaborating for you.
Oh, hell yeah. I’m from the US, though I’ve lived abroad for years. The portion sizes were absolutely shocking to me when I went back for a visit this winter. Everything was so cheap too. A meal out cost only about 75% what an equivalent in Japan would be on a per-item basis. In food volume/currency, a US restaurant meal is almost unbelievably cheap. I couldn’t finish any of the meals I ordered on my trip except for a Togo’s sandwich; I was hungry that day. I could be remembering wrong, but I think portions have gotten even bigger in the few years since I left the US. I took a trip to Spain this summer. The portions are much smaller than the US, even at touristy places.
I think one thing that helps in feeling full is eating a variety of food at every sitting. Lots of little plates of different foods adds up to satisfying eating while taking enough time to consume that you’ll actually pay attention to your body’s signals. It also means that you don’t have to eat a lot of something you’re not especially hungry for just so that you feel satisfied. If you’re hungry for protein, you could eat lots and lots of carbs and fat, to the point where your stomach is distended, and yet still feel hungry. I speak from personal experience on this last.
In the US, side dishes are an afterthought that are often dispensed with completely. Massive main dishes are the rule, and they rarely provide a good balance of basic nutrients. It seems to me that the many different dishes style of dining is pretty common outside the US.
Well, though I used Applebee’s in my OP, you have caught me out. I do not actually eat at any of those places. I try, as a rule, to avoid chain restaurants, so that may explain it. I’ll have to go to a TGIFriday’s and inconspiculously observe the other diners and their portions. There’s no way I’m eating that much myself, not even in the name of science.
But if people in other countries are basing their option of American portion sizes on the example set by chain restaurants, then I gotta tell you: The meatloaf at Cheesecake Factory? Not even three normal Americans could, or would want to, finish that of.
I always wonder why Denny’s distinguishes its meals at all. No matter what specific meal you ask for, it always comes with eggs, three kinds of meat (sausage patties and sausage links are different), toast and pancakes anyway.
As far as diet soda goes, the way it might make you gain weight, for me anyway, is that it kind of cleanses my palate and actually makes me feel not as full, opening up the possibility of that extra course, or dessert.