Disease Proof

In light of last week’s report claiming chefs could be to blame for America’s fatness. A new report suggests the contrary. Apparently small portions are all the rage in US restaurants. Reuters explains:

A poll by the National Restaurant Association found that small is now big on restaurant menus, according to 1,282 professional chefs questioned for its second annual "What's Hot...What's Not" food and drink survey.


Other hot trends cited by the chefs, all of whom were members of the American Culinary Federation, included alternative-source ingredients, ethnic flavors, and specialty alcohol.

"The trend of small plates is definitely hot, including offering tasting menus of small portions of food, wine or other alcohol beverages," chef John Kinsella, president of the American Culinary Federation and senior chef instructor at Midwest Culinary Institute in Cincinnati, said in a statement.

Dr. Fuhrman is rather blunt on this topic. To him, smaller portions and counting calories is kind of dumb. He talks about it in his book Eat to Live. Here’s an excerpt:

It is meaningless to compare foods by weight or portion size. Let me provide an example to explain why this is the case. Take one teaspoon of melted butter, which gets 100 percent of its calories from fat. If I take that teaspoon of butter and mix it in a glass of hot water, I can now say that it is 98 percent fat-free, by weight. One hundred percent of its calories are still from fat. It didn’t matter how much water or weight was added, did it?