Fast-food customers underestimate calories being consumed

Next time you go out for that big burger, bucket of fries and super-sized soda, you better bring along your calculator just to be safe.

Photo: Fast-food customers underestimate calories being consumed

Most people, no matter how large or small they are, tend to underestimate how many calories are in fast-food meals a big problem as portion sizes have ballooned, a new study has found.

People make more accurate guesses when determining the calories in smaller meals, according to the results of the study being published Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

"This is not an issue of knowledge, of motivational biases that people want to lie (about what they eat). It's just ingrained perceptual bias that we can't control," said Pierre Chandon, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at the international business school INSEAD in Fontainebleau near Paris.

The study was broken up into two parts. First, researchers asked 105 people eating at fast-food restaurants in three U.S. Midwestern cities to estimate the number of calories in the meals they had just eaten.

In the second part of the study, 40 undergraduate students were asked to estimate the number of calories in 15 sizes of a fast-food meal. The meals, varying in calories from 445 to 1780 calories, consisted of chicken nuggets, fries and soda in varying amounts.

The results were similar no matter how much the participants weighed or whether they were male or female, the researchers found. However, overweight people in the first part of the study tended to buy larger meals, accounting for why they were more inclined to eat more calories than smaller people.

"It's good news because it takes the real stigma out of saying, 'Heavy people just don't get it,"' said Dr. Madelyn Fernstrom, director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Weight Management Center. "That's not true. What this study shows is it's the amount of food on the plate that's fooling people."

Fernstrom, who was not involved in the study, said as portions have gotten larger, it has been harder for people to estimate what a standard portion should be. The amount people should eat seems puny compared to the mounds of food we have become used to seeing on our plates, she said.

"This is showing human foibles. It's hard to estimate food. And it's really hard to estimate huge portions," Fernstrom said.

Doctors say there are many strategies people can use so they do not make the mistake of underestimating their calories, reports AP.