This is one of my favorite examples of self-delusion. How many potato chips do you take from the bag? How much soda do you drink from the bottle? If you even think about it at all, you would probably tell yourself you are having “one serving”. Of course if you look carefully at that label, you will find it has 2 or even 3 servings in it. How many of you take half of a snack pack bag and save the rest for later? I didn’t think so.
Gretchen Rubin lists many of the reasons we fall
into this trap. The first one is
key. How much is one serving? I have no clue what one ounce of chips or
nuts or hummus looks like. Do they
really expect me to? If you know what
the official serving size looks like, you would be shocked. It is really just a few chips or nuts. But instead we take a huge handful and then
probably follow it up with another one.
And we tell ourselves that we are only having one “serving”. This article at Health Castle has some good
rules of thumb, but even these are just bare estimates. And the truth is that we
don’t really think about it. We just
take whatever seems natural, which depends more on the size of our hand or the
size of our serving bowl than it does on the food.
This is one of the reasons that those 100-calorie
products have become so popular, even as they are ripping you off by giving you
less food at a higher price. You are
paying the company to protect you from yourself. I also like a prototype idea I heard Pringles
was trying out. Every 10th
chip (or whatever one serving is – I don’t even know) was colored red. This was a signal that you have hit a full
serving without wasting money and carbon footprint on more packaging.
