Today I interviewed Elizabeth M. Venditti, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, about the specifics of the HEALTHY program. Eager to share her wealth of information, Beth immediately wrote down a couple of important websites pertaining to the issue that she thought would be imperative to add to my blogroll.
One website http://hin.nhlbi.nih.gov/portion/keep.htm offers an insightful way to emphasize the increase in food and drink portion sizes over the last 20 years. It provides two interactive quizzes from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Each quiz (titled Portion Distortion I and Portion Distortion II) tests your knowledge of how many calories are in our current food portions and how much exercise would be needed to effectively balance energy.
To begin with, the test provides two pictures juxtaposed in a way to visually represent the differences in portion sizes of items like muffins, coffee drinks, pastas, salads, popcorn, and even chicken stir fry. It then offers a multiple choice set of calorie numbers so you can guess how many more calories our current portions entail as opposed to the portions from 20 years prior. Once the correct answer is given, you are then asked to guess how many hours it would take to burn off the new amount of calories doing everyday activities such as vacuuming, car washing, walking the dog, water aerobics, or bike riding.
Test your knowledge with these fun quizzes, I bet you’ll be surprised.
