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Nutrition Information (expressed per 100 g of food) helps consumers compare products, but additional information ‘per portion’ helps consumers to estimate the content of their serving. In Europe, breakfast cereal companies now routinely use a set of standard portion sizes developed in 2008 by their trade association CEEREAL, and these have recently been reviewed to ensure that they are still realistic and reasonable. As part of this process, we compared data from national dietary surveys across Europe that provided median amounts of breakfast cereals on consuming days, as proxy for portion sizes. In addition, we compared data from the Irish Food Portion Sizes database, which used a more precise method. Estimated portion sizes varied widely, but the average was within the range of the current standard serving size used by CEEREAL (30-45 g) although towards the upper end of this range. Weighed data from Ireland tended to give higher values for muesli.
Standardised portion sizes give a useful guideline for consumers, without being overly prescriptive. They represent typical amounts consumed by adults, although teenagers and active adults may consume more and young children may need less than the quoted portion. Consumers would benefit if retailers, manufacturers, health professionals and non-government organisations used a consistent set of portion sizes in communicating dietary advice. Tools could be developed to help consumers estimate their portion size. Further work is desirable to obtain better estimates of portion sizes by secondary analysis, to explore whether observed differences between countries are real or attributable to methodology, and to develop portion sizes for different age groups.
Complete Nutrition (CN) Focus Vol.8 No.3 October 2016