Large Fast Food Portions May Have More Calories Than You Think.

Brian Wansink, professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University conducted a study on people who eat at fast food restaurants and determined that people eating at fast food restaurants underestimate the calories in their meals by 12 to 41 percent. According to him, large portions seem to be the problem.

According to one of his latest studies, the more you eat, the more likely you are to underestimate the calories. Overall, it was determined that people under-estimated the meals calories by 23 percent. People who ordered smaller meals, however, had a smaller margin of error. It seems that the bigger the meal, the more people misjudged the calorie content. For example, people who ordered meals containing 1,100 to 1,260 calories were under-estimating their meals calorie content by38 percent.

In a different study, 40 college students were asked to estimate the calories of 15 fast food meals that consisted of the same foods but different portions. The students could correctly guess the calories of the smaller meals, however, they underestimated the larger portioned meals by 22 percent.

Experts are suggesting that large portions are becoming more and more normal which is making it harder for us to recognize when we are eating too much. In a related study, people were misjudging their meal portions by up to 20 percent. When asked to bring in a "medium" bagel, muffin, fruit, cookie, etc, almost everyone brough in an item that exceeded the definition of a medium item based on nutritional recommendations.

Some people suggest that making nutritional value more obvious and available would help solve this problem but that doesn't seem to be the case, according to another study by Wansink. Researchers compared 250 Subway customers, who can find their nutritional information very easily on napkins and signs in the restaurant, and 250 McDonald's customers who do not have easy access to their foods nutritional information.

The McDonald's customers were eating higher calorie meals but they were only underestimating their meals calorie content by about 12 percent. However, the Subway customers were eating smaller calorie meals but were underestimating their meals calories by roughly 41 percent.

Wansink contributes the error to what he calls the "halo effect." What he means is that when people are told that their food is healthy, they assume that everything is low calorie and forget about added calories from things like drinks, chips, cheese, mayo, and other similar things. Wansink suggests that you try to estimate the calories of items individually and assume that a large meal probably has about twice the calories you think it does.