Take Control of Your Portions Poster: Portion Control Poster

Learning objectives & benefits:

• The main point about this poster is not to accept the over-sized servings given to you by food manufacturers and restaurants.
• Consumers need to re-portion their portions so they are realistic.
• Plates are used to show how a package is really bigger than you think!
• Look what happens when you pour a value meal onto a real dinner plate.
  
• How to make a value meal a real value - split it in half and add a salad - now it feeds 2 and the calories are cut by over 50% - they go from 1250 to 550.
  
• Most people will grab a big beverage and they can visualize a cup instead.
  
• Some snack bags contain way too many servings. This shows them to pre-portion snacks and stay on track.
• Big baked goods are everywhere and they are waiting to derail any healthy eating or weight control plan. Now you can divide them up and round them out with fruit and yogurt.
• All photos use a plate to help people visualize healthy servings on real plates.
• The photos in this poster are stunning. They grab attention fast! And people remember what they see visually.
• All topics support the messages given in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and MyPlate. The topics chosen are designed to support today's consumers so they can make better choices in their fast-paced lifestyles.
• It also makes a great classroom poster plus it can be used as a school cafeteria poster.

Target population: In English, for general audiences, ages 12 - 100

Research for the items chosen on this poster:

According to industry reports, burger sales are over $63 billion dollars each year. Consumers are faced with value meal offers each time they stop and these popular choices rank number one in sales in most units. This poster will show them that a value meal is a lot bigger than they think when they see the photo of the real value meal poured out of packaging containers onto the dinner plate. But they can make it a better value by sharing it, along with a salad. The photos of the portion control makeover use a real value meal and save 700 calories per person. The makeover is a good example of making a healthy plate because half of the plate is vegetables. It is small baby step for most people who eat out all the time and can be a segue for even better choices in your lesson plans.

And soda sales may be slipping by 1% a year but they are still at about 8.9 billion cases per year. The per capita consumption for soda in the US is 165 litres! That is a lot of soda! Beverages are one of the top sources of sugar in the American diet, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Most single-serving bottles are 2 cups or more but consuming just an 8 ounce cup will keep the sugar calories within the limit for discretionary calories for most people.

And packaged bakery items for breakfast have reached record sales of $14 billion dollars in the US. This is why we picked these items to show on our poster. We feel they are simple to understand but make a huge impact. Chips are the favorite salty snack with sales strong at over $6 billion dollars in the US.

Money spent on meals eaten away from home is steadily climbing and about 43%:

Sources: Food Product Design, Reuters, Beverage Digest, Time Magazine, POS Sector, Burger Business, Bloomberg, USDA, ers.usda, Dietary Guidelines for Americans, USPotatoes.com, Forbes, Health.Gov, Manufacturer's Data.

We would like to thank Lynn Greiger, RD, for her valuable input to make the messages on this poster positive and clear.

This poster comes with a free handout download PDF shown in the images above.