Fun with portion sizes

Last night, as I was eating my delicious roasted cauliflower/chickpeas/red onion over penne pasta, I got to thinking about serving sizes. Specifically how out of whack they are in this country. I've read the USDA 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and in general their recommendations seem to agree with what I consider common sense - an emphasis on whole grains, vegetables, and lean sources of protein. The sample eating plan for a 2,000 calorie diet (which is about right for a woman of my weight/height) looks like I wouldn't starve following it. But then I started considering serving sizes, specifically for things like pasta, meat, and cheese.

For pasta, the recommendation is 1 oz dry or 1/2 cup cooked. For cheese, it's 1 oz, with a recommendation that it be skim/low/non-fat. Having just recently received a kitchen scale for my birthday, I decided to weigh out a single serving of each. (Next time I have meat on hand, I'll weigh out the recommended 3 oz as well.) Here's what that looks like:

That's 21 pieces of generic penne pasta, and a 1/4 inch thick slice of a block of feta from the grocery store (I abhor low fat cheese; besides, when you're only eating 1 oz, what's the point?). That much pasta measures roughly 1/4 cup in a 2 cup Pyrex measuring glass.

Two things astonished me about this little experiment. One, last night I had eaten roughly 4 oz of penne for dinner - that's four servings! Two, tonight when I made the exact same dish with the carefully weighed serving sizes, I felt completely satisfied after eating it. Maybe there is something to this serving size business.

Random side note - as I was googling for serving sizes, it was much more difficult than I had expected to find sites listing out serving sizes by weigh. Almost every site (and all of them on the first page of search results) was full of helpful information on how to guestimate servings (a deck of cards = 3 oz meat, 1 oz cheese = 1 domino, etc.). Apparently the actual weights and measures involved are too complicated for the general internet public.

After this little experiment, it occurs to me that a documented experiment in the "Serving Size Diet (tm)" could be my ticket to fame and fortune. All I'd have to do is weigh, measure, and count calories for everything I put in my mouth, lose weight while doing it, document the whole thing, and BAM, I'm a celebrity like Jared from Subway. Of course, there's probably significantly less mass appeal in rigid meal planning, careful shopping, and portion discipline than in walking to Subway for every meal. But maybe I could appeal to people like that poor misguided fatty from Supersize Me who, after Jared came to her high school to give a speech, bemoaned, "But I can't afford to eat at Subway every day!"

As you can probably tell, I'm becoming majorly disillusioned with American eating habits across the board, and the quick fix fad diets that are marketed as the answer. I think maybe the answer may be as simple as sitting down to a dinner of 1 oz of spaghetti with 3 1 oz meatballs.