Panera, Chipotle, and Olive Garden Offer Larger-than-Life Portions

It's tough to resist restaurants like Chipotle, Panera Bread, and Olive Garden with their tasty-looking offerings at reasonable prices. To fight the urge, here's one giant reason (literally): their serving sizes. Just like other fast food restaurants, theses restaurants' dishes are monstrous, according to a new report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), and they may be a big culprit in creating America's obesity epidemic.

The worst part is that after so many years of such ginormous platters being the norm, consumers feel jipped if they're provided with a healthy portion size. "Super sizes are alive and well, not just at fast-food chains, but at restaurants of all stripes," writes Jayne Hurley and Bonnie Liebman in CSPI's September newsletter.

The report researched the caloric content of several popular meals at well-known chain restaurants and compared them with the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) daily recommended serving size. Put the average sandwich, burrito, or burger on a scale and it should weigh five ounces (about one deck of cards). Now, says CSPI, a Chipotle burrito weighs 21 ounces, a Panera sandwich weights 14 ounces, and a McDonald's Big Mac and Angus Burger weigh 7 and 11 ounces respectively.

CSPI also studied pasta, cookies, steak, bagels, and smoothies. That Outback Steakhouse ribeye steak? About 14 ounces, more than four times the recommended USDA serving of just three ounces. That bowl of Olive Garden spaghetti? It's not one, but three-and-a-half servings, according to FDA numbers. And that's not even considering the serving size possibilities when the restaurant offers its "Never-ending Pasta Bowl" special.

What's wrong with all this food? The dishes provide more calories the average person should ever eat in one sitting. That enormous Chipotle burrito will put its eater back about 900 calories. Of course, consumers could easily split their entrees and ask for doggie bags (in fact, that's what many dietitians and nutritionists recommend). But people tend to eat all that is put in front of them. Chalk it up to the old lick-your-platter-clean mentality. People do not notice they've consumed a double or triple portion of food, according to a 2006 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, nor do folks recognize differences in serving sizes from one night to another.

Check out a photo of the USDA's half sandwich recommendation and it's clear that we've all been brainwashed. The sandwich looks puny. It hardly seems like three bites' worth of lunch. But that's our super-sized minds talking. In the 1970s, that was the normal amount of food people ate at one meal. In fact, Americans eat about 530 more calories each day than we did in 1970, according to the USDA's Economic Research Service, with most of the increase coming from refined grains, sugars, fats, and oils. We expect more food now even though we definitely don't need it. If folks ate three meals and several snacks a day, those small, USDA-recommended serving sizes add up to a reasonable, healthy intake of 1,400 to 2,000 calories.

Restaurants need to get over their "bigger is better" mentality and start serving up dishes that are actually meant for a single person to eat in a single meal. Until they do, however, people should be able to compare the size and calorie content of a 21st-century (enormous) serving to the USDA's recommended serving size. Maybe they'd think twice. That's the rationale behind a new menu calorie posting requirement within the federal government's new health care bill and the FDA's current debate of whether to enlarge portion sizes on the Nutrition Facts panel on the back of every food package. Wendy Reinhardt Kapsak of the International Food Information Council Foundation told the New York Times, “To consumers, the serving size appears to be inconsistent and unintuitive. They have trouble trusting it.” Seems like we shouldn't trust our eyes, either, before biting into that burrito.

Photo credit: gtrwndr87 via Flickr