Your serve

Working out portion sizes to meet daily healthy-eating requirements demands a measure of give and take

- Jennifer Bowden

Question: 

You often write about servings of healthy foods. But what is a serving? Is it measured by weight, volume or cup, for instance? And are servings for fruit, nuts, red meat, whole grains, etc, all measured similarly?

Answer:

What Costco calls a muffin would almost have qualified as a familysized cake W during my childhood in the 1970s and 80s. And muffins are not the only "growing" food in New Zealand: a 2018 study by the University of Auckland found that fast-food serving sizes increased significantly during the 2010s. If these changes confirm one thing, it's that serving sizes are a moving target. They also vary widely between countries according to different food traditions, a recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health noted. For example, a serving of pasta is defined as 80g of raw pasta in Italy.

In contrast, our Ministry of Health defines a serving as 1 cup of cooked pasta-about 56g of uncooked pasta.

The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code does not define a standard serving size. This is the code that sets legal requirements for the labelling, composition, safety, handling, primary production and processing of food here and across the Tasman. With no defined serving sizes in the code, there are no regulations on the serving sizes used on the nutrition information panel that appears on food packaging.

The only guidance that Food Standards Australia New Zealand (the agency responsible for the code) provides is that serving sizes specified by a food business should reflect a realistic portion of the food a person would typically consume on one eating occasion. So, although one cereal manufacturer might consider a third of a cup of muesli a standard serving size, another might specify something different.