The serving sizes on breakfast cereals might appear paltry to most adults, so will they really fill you up?
By Bee Wilson
We all know – or you'd hope so – that a big part of the obesity crisis is inflated portion sizes. A single chocolate-chunk cookie from Starbucks, as big as a saucer, is 499 calories, more than a quarter of the energy a child needs in a day.
But while portions in cafés, bakeries and fast-food places tend to be massive – and don't get me started on cinema popcorn – the recommended portions on food packets are often minuscule. Tesco Jumbo Salted Cashews claim that a portion is 25g, providing just 155 calories. If there is anyone alive restrained enough to eat such a measly quantity of nuts, particularly at cocktail hour, I haven't met them.
The serving sizes on breakfast cereals can also resemble fantasy more than truth. Kellogg's Raisin Wheats claims that a portion is 40g, but this would hardly dent the appetite of my teenage boy (who admittedly is 6ft 7in). When you pour 40g into a cereal bowl, it looks paltry; maybe I should get smaller bowls. Yet 40g is generous compared with the 20g of Rice Krispies and 17g of Corn Flakes from the individual boxes of a Kellogg's variety pack.
What I didn't realise, until I spoke to Paul Wheeler, a spokesperson for Kellogg's, was that portion sizes for cereals 'are the same wherever you go in the EU'. A few years ago Kellogg's, Jordans, Weetabix and Nestlé all agreed to 'harmonise' their servings.
For most cereals it is 30g, though for muesli (which is denser) it's 45g. Wheeler tells me that the thinking on this was that 'the main consumers of breakfast cereal are children' and apparently lots of studies have shown that 30g is about what most children can manage. 'It's a really good portion,' says Wheeler, though he does admit that adults 'eat a bit more'. But the other crucial factor is that Kellogg's cereals are fortified and a bowlful is designed to deliver 25 per cent of the day's vitamins and minerals.
This doesn't apply to Dorset Cereals, whose mueslis and granolas are non-fortified mixtures of grains, nuts, seeds and fruits. Earlier this year Dorset launched some new 'breakfast pots' aimed at office workers: a single portable serving with room for milk (99p each in three varieties from Waitrose or Sainsbury's).
Mandy Cooper of Dorset Cereals explains how they decided the portion (75g). 'We just asked 50 people to pour out what they thought was a normal amount.' The quantities were then averaged out. This sounds nice and sensible.
The 75g in the pots is lots more than the 45g normally recommended for muesli, but still only 300 to 400 calories including milk. 'We thought, you're at your desk, you want a proper breakfast,' says Cooper. 'You don't want something where at 11 o'clock you think, "Crikey! I need a muffin.'
Funnily enough, though, when The Sunday Telegraph's Stella office tried these breakfast pots, they found them 'delicious but way too small'. The associate food editor, Katie Drummond, who is svelte and not greedy, said she was 'hungry about an hour later'.
All of which brings home how hard it is for the food industry to set credible serving sizes. One person's stingy helping is another person's overkill. Paul Wheeler of Kellogg's notes wryly that 'we can't be sitting next to you at breakfast', instructing how many Bran Flakes to pour out. And as Mandy Cooper at Dorset says, 'It all depends whether you're going to have toast as well.'
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