09 Jul 2015 BIG! How American food and people have expanded

The general philosophy in the United States seems to be “bigger is better”.  And over the past several decades, Americans have supersized sodas, refrigerators, food portions and themselves.

1. Portion sizes

Everyone knows that portions in the US are large and have been getting larger – but by how much?

When McDonalds first partnered with Coca-Cola in 1955, the only size of a beverage available was 7 ounces (207ml). By 1999, McDonald’s had introduced a drink that was literally six times as large as that – the 42 ounce Super-Size (1 242ml). Today, the largest size that McDonald’s serves in the US is 30 ounces (887ml).

A similar trend has been at work with its french fries, hamburgers and restaurant meals in general. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the average restaurant meal today is four times larger than it was in the 1950s.

As the graphic below from the CDC shows, the size of the average soda, hamburger and french fries portion has grown substantially since the 1950s.

2. Chickens

To meet the insatiable demand for white meat, America has super-sized its chickens. As this article explains, Americans now eat 80 pounds (36.2kg) of chicken per person per year, and it’s begun breeding bigger and breastier chickens as a result.

According to a study published last year, the most commonly raised type of chicken in 1957 weighed only about two pounds when it was 56 days old. Today, the most commonly bred type of chicken weighs nine pounds at the same age.

3. Themselves

With the size of their food getting so much bigger, it follows naturally that Americans themselves are getting larger.

The average American woman today weighs 166.2 pounds (75.38kg), which is almost exactly as much as the average American man weighed about 50 years ago.

The average weight of an American woman rose 18.5 percent in that period, from 140 pounds (63.5kg) in 1960.

Men aren’t doing much better. Their average weight has risen 17.6 percent in the same time period to 195.5 pounds (88.67kg) today. To make the same comparison, an American man today weighs almost as much as 1.5 American women from the 1960s (read more on this here).

Note that upturn starts in 1980, three years after promulgation of USDA Dietary Goals for Americans. Unrelated?

Source: Washington Post