Don't Super Size Me!

Last month New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a big splash when he banned the sale of sugary sodas larger than 16 ounces. Late-night hosts like Jon Stewart went ballistic with their outrage, lampooning the decision incessantly.

Bloomberg's action is one of several he has taken to address a problem that has been well known for years, and made notorious by the documentary Super Size Me, in which director Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's food for a month. (It took him 14 months to lose the 20 pounds he gained in that single month.)

There are solid reasons for people to cut back on their consumption of soda (including diet soda), as I've noted on this blog before. Americans are becoming severely—even morbidly—obese, resulting in rampant diabetes and the attendant miseries of amputation, blindness, heart disease and stroke. Pervasive diabetes is a major contributor to skyrocketing health care costs.

The problem with oversized drink containers is that they cause people to consume far greater quantities of soda than they would otherwise, in large part because once they've drunk their fill no one wants to let the extra "go to waste." Instead it goes to fat.

A common trick for dieting is to use smaller plates and glasses. People eating a meal from a small full-looking plate feel like they're getting more food than if they eat the same amount from a large empty-looking plate. If you've ever gone to a fancy restaurant and said, "I paid how much for that?" when they brought out gigantic plates with apparently tiny portions you know exactly what I mean.

Because of this quirk of human cognition, limiting your choices at the theater concession stand to 8-, 12- and 16-ounce cups, you will never feel deprived by the absence of 32-ounce sperm-whale size. You will drink a more modest 16 ounces and feel completely sated and a little less bloated. And you won't have to visit the rest room half way through the movie.

What's more, the capacity of an average human stomach is 900 mL, or 30.4 ounces. Since no one likes flat, warm, watery soda the 32-ounce size is overkill for anyone except gigantic NFL linebackers who burn 5,000 calories a day by just breathing.

It's ironic that people are screaming bloody murder when Bloomberg reduces the maximum size of soda containers, but when the companies that sell food cut down on the size of the containers and charge the same price no one utters a peep. That's because the companies know the plate-size trick and use it to fool us into thinking we're getting the same amount of food.

For example, the standard size of "family-sized" ice cream containers used to be half a gallon. Several years ago most dairies cut the size of half-gallon containers to 1.5 quarts. They changed the dimensions of the container to make them look bigger, usually making them taller and thinner and putting a half-inch empty space at the bottom of 4.5-inch tall containers. Some dairies then upped the size to 1.75 quarters, to give "almost 20% more!"

Ninety-six-ounce bottles of orange juice have been redesigned with different shapes, bigger spouts and 89-ounce capacities. Half-gallon cartons of lemonade have been reduced to 59 ounces. These companies aren't doing this for our health: they're selling us less food for the same money while using deceptive packaging to hide the fact that they're ripping us off.


And when you're in the juice aisles in the grocery store you have to be extremely careful to make sure that you're actually getting juice: most of the products sold these days contain only a small percentage of real juice. They consist mainly of filtered water and high-fructose corn syrup. To deceive us into thinking these contain real juice, the bottles are often emblazoned with a huge "100%" over a tiny "of daily vitamin C from ascorbic acid," which is typically a chemically produced nutrient.

No matter how you slice it, Bloomberg isn't tromping on anyone's freedom. He's not stopping anyone from buying 32 ounces of soda: just buy two 16-ouncers if your gullet is really that big.

There's nothing wrong with occasionally drinking moderate amounts of soda, or eating ice cream and baked goods if you're physically active enough to burn off the excess calories. But having a Big Gulp every day will put you on the Type 2 train to an early death. And cost the rest of us billions of dollars in extra health care costs and lost productivity.


Who's the real villain here? Bloomberg, for trying to deal with a serious problem like obesity that's killing millions of people and costing us hundreds of billions of dollars each year in medical costs?


Or companies that use deceptive packaging to mislead us and charge us more? Companies like McDonalds, whose share holders demand that profits spiral ever upward, which can only occur if Americans eat more junk food and gain more weight? Companies like PepsiCo (which owns juice bottlers in addition to its soft drink concerns) who have been silently weaning us off pure, nutritious juice to more profitable watered-down "juice drinks" and sodas filled with empty calories from corn syrup?