Portion Sizes in Restaurants Quadruple Since 1950s

Mike Barrett
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, July 7, 2012

It seems that while obesity rates have risen over the decades, so have portion sizes – not a particularly surprising connection. In fact, an incredibly alarming infographic helps to show that not only have meal sizes increased in size over the decades, but restaurant portion sizes have quadrupled since the 1950's.

Portion Sizes Grow 4 Times Bigger Since 1950's

Could this be the reason for the ballooning obesity epidemic? The infographic created by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that hamburgers and french fry meals have tripled in size over the decades, while a cup of fountain soda is a whopping 6 times larger today than it used to be. A 2.4oz portion of french fries has grown to 6.7oz; hamburgers from 3.9oz to 12oz; and soda from 7oz to 42oz.

What may be even worse is that accompanied by this massive increase in portion sizes is the heavy use of harmful and toxic ingredients. While the ingredients used in food used to be minimal, you can find a plethora of toxic substances in the majority of food today, including MSG, aspartame, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, neotame, caramel coloring, and much more. McDonald’s chicken McNuggets, which would be expected to have nearly 0 ingredients, contains autolyzed yeast extract, dimethylpolysiloxane, sodium phosphate, to name a few ingredients. Even something as simple as ‘strawberry flavor‘ consists of nearly 50 different chemicals. These ingredients along with many more can be found throughout the mainstream food supply.

Honing in on the specific increase in portion sizes along with the average increase in weight, there has been a:

28 pound increase in average weight of a man since 1960s24.5 pound increase in average weight of a woman since the 1960s4.56 increase in size of restaurant portion compared to the 1950s1,233 percent increase in chocolate bar size since early 1900s223 percent increase in hamburger size since 1950s500 percent increase in fountain soda size since 1950s

Given the continuous downfall of the average American diet over the decades, it is no surprise to see obesity rates (and subsequently every other illness and disease) skyrocket in recent years. Unfortunately, Americans have some of the worst diets in the world, and everyone knows it! With portion sizes increasing, toxic ingredients making their way into the food supply, and Americans continuing to consume this food, it is estimated that 50% of the population will be obese by 2030, lurking around the 60% nation-wide obesity rates in 2010.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Are Americans consuming too many calories? Unfortunately, yes. What’s more, the massive increase isn’t only leading individuals to experience health problems, but work productivity suffers as well. Obese individuals take more sick days and are less productive than health-weight individuals, with the most obese people taking 5-9 more sick days a year. Not only are hospitals, buses, and airplanes making adjustments to accommodate for large individuals, but employers are also paying the price as well. In many cases this loss is in the form of thousands of 10's of thousands of dollars each year. Actually, the cost of obesity in this regard is thought to be nearly $73.1 billion annually.

The good news is that with a little calorie management, exercise, and organic living, obesity rates can easily begin to spiral downward.

Additional Sources:

DailyMail

DukeToday

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Inequality "worst since second world war"

This seems to show that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the welfare state in Britain is being systematically demolished, and with that, inequality has grown exponentially. It is down to the anger and organisation of the working class. Right now class struggle is as miniscule as a gnat's cock and so the elite crush everyone for the working class sloth...

In his Beveridge Memorial Lecture to The Royal Statistical Society, Sheffield University's Danny Dorling says that an expert in inequality, says the richest one per cent of people in the UK take home fifteen per cent of all income, compared to 6% in 1979.

Professor Dorling, an expert in inequality, said: "If we look back about 100 years, we can see that inequality in the UK did drop significantly in the 70 years from 1910-1979. More than half of that drop in inequality took place prior to 1939. Since 1979 these inequalities have risen dramatically and continue to rise.

"The last time the best-off took as big a share of all income as they do today was in 1940, two years before the publication of the Beveridge Report, which became the basis of the UK's welfare state after the Second World War."

Professor Dorling says that to get into the top one per cent now requires an income of about £120,000 and this super elite have been awarding themselves huge pay rises in part to offset sterling's depreciation against other currencies.

"The super-rich ompare themselves to a global elite and sterling's depreciation has meant that compared to their peers in Europle or the US they are losing ground. Hence we see bankers and top CEOs getting big pay rises. It does not have to be that way beacuse in Switzerland and the Netherlands the top one percent take 6% of national income not 15%. It's our elites that are greedy."

Importantly the top 1% are pulling away from the rest of the rich. To get into the top 10% of incomes requires about £60,000 a year.

Professor Dorling said: "Even looking at the next-most well-off people, the gap between them and the richest is growing. In the early 1940s, the 'nine per cent' - the rest of the best-off ten per cent less the richest one per cent - were paid an average salary of 2.4 times average incomes, the same as in 1959, 1969 and 1973. But as inequalities rose, by 1990 this 'nine per cent' were paid three times average incomes and that continued until 2007.

"However, for the last five years their share has been dropping towards that 2.4 historic average. As each year passes, and the richest one per cent get richer still, the rest of the best-off ten per cent increasingly have a little more in common with the remaining nine-tenths of society, and less and less in common with those at the very top."

His lecture also addresses how fair Britain is compared to his past

Up until 1989 this is the best-off tenth of households (or more strictly 'tax-units'), after then it is adults. After 1975 it relates to all income declared for tax purposes (so tax dodging is excluded) and after 1920 what became the Republic of Ireland is excluded. More important than all these caveats is the fact that missing data has been interpolated so that when one line in the graph appears to exactly follow another, that is because it is estimated from that other (which figures are interpolated and which are not is shown in Appendix Table 1)

Inequalities by the measures shown here peaked in 1923, the year after the (1922) Great Gatsby summer (Fitzgerald, 1925). Then the best-off tenth of households in the UK took almost half the national annual income. Almost a quarter was taken by the best-off one-in-one-hundred, leaving 'just' a quarter of all income for the remaining nine tenths of the best-off tenth to share between them. The richest 1 in 1000 households in that year took home almost 6% of all income, but that share had been sliding since it had hit its maxima of almost 7% just a year after the Titanic sank (1912) which also happened to be the year in which the play 'The Inspector Calls' was set. The richest 1 in 10,000 households still took a staggering 3.34% in 1923, more than twice their share even today.

A key turning point, in hindsight, was 1936. It was then that the income of the best-off 1 in 1,000 peaked again at a lower point of 4.68% before falling fairly continuously to a minima of just under 1.00% of all income between 1977 and 1979 inclusive. The share of the richest thousandth's then rose to reach a new peak of 4.61% in 2007, before appearing to fall again in the two most recent years of data. I say 'appearing' as this is income declared for tax purposes and many of the richest people in Britain say they are no longer domiciled in Britain and do not pay tax here ( "tax is for the little people")

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