The 134 page long report by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recommended decreasing the size of the food portions in the 900,000 restaurants and other places serving food across America.
It is hoped that by doing so they would be able to restrict the consumption of calories of each individual and thus help the Americans in the long run by becoming less overweight. According to the report 64% of the Americans are overweight and about 30% out of these are obese. The report says that due to this problem the yearly health care cost of this is nearly $93 billion.
The report said that french fries, hamburgers and pizzas are some of the most popular food that are eaten outside the home in the US. Thus restaurants would definitely be able to play a central role in making Americans less fat.
The restaurants apart from decreasing the size of the portions can also give the people varied choices of low calorie food and make the meals with larger quantities of fruits and vegetables. It has also been suggested that by displaying the calorie count of each food item the consumption of calories would be reduced, since people would tend to opt for lower calorie food items.
The National Restaurant Association felt that their industry was being targeted for no fault of theirs. Sheila Cohn, director of the association believes that it is not a feasible idea to mark the calories of each food item since it is an expensive process to calculate the calorie count of each food item and would not be possible in the places where the menus change everyday.
Cohn said that even though food served could be made of different portion sizes and be prepared with whole grains and low calorie ingredients, ultimately if the consumer did not order these food items from the menu they would be consumed at all.
