Portion size: How much should you eat?
The Food Chain
BBC
4.7 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How much food is the “right” amount - and why is it so hard to work that out?
Ruth Alexander explores the world of portion sizes, starting with the rise of “portion distortion” in the United States, where supersized sodas and giant restaurant plates became the norm. Nutritionist Lisa Young explains how this shift happened, and what it’s meant for public health.
In São Paulo, dietitian Marle Alvarenga shares new research comparing Brazil, France, and the US, revealing how culture and globalisation shape what feels like a normal portion. Why are French plates so much smaller - and meals so much slower - than in Brazil or America?
And psychologist Lenny Vartanian in Sydney explains the powerful pull of portion size on our behaviour: why bigger servings make us eat more, even when we know better, and why education alone isn’t enough to change our habits.
If you would like to get in touch with the show, please email: thefoodchain@bbc.co.uk
Producer: Izzy Greenfield
Photo: Three spoons showing different portion sizes (credit: getty)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm no longer ravenous. I'll no longer eat until I fall asleep. |
| 0:11.0 | The Hunger Game, a new five-part series exploring the meteoric rise of weight loss drugs. |
| 0:16.0 | It's been an incredible story with these drugs. |
| 0:18.1 | The uptake, the amount of product that's been sold, the amount of money is cost. What the drugs do, how they work, and the knock-on effects of their widespread use. |
| 0:26.5 | We'll be sitting here in three years' time going, oh, it caused problems that we're now going |
| 0:31.3 | to have to fix. The Hunger Game with me, Professor Gilesio. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:44.9 | Thank you. me, Professor Gilesio. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to the food chain from the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. And this week we're focusing on portion size, how much we put on |
| 0:51.1 | our plate, how much we should put on our plate, |
| 0:56.3 | and why it's so difficult to get it right. |
| 1:01.7 | And I'm in my kitchen because we're going to start by comparing portion sizes here in the UK with those in the United States. |
| 1:04.2 | And joining me from New York is my colleague Natalie Jimenez. |
| 1:08.5 | Natalie, hello, thanks so much for being with us today. Thanks for having me. |
| 1:12.4 | Now, we have both been hard at work ordering ourselves takeout for lunch, haven't we? And from the same |
| 1:19.2 | fast food company, large chicken nuggets and fries, and I'm very interested to know how many nuggets you've got. |
| 1:26.9 | I got 20. I got double, so I got |
| 1:29.8 | 40, a little bit heavier than yours. Yeah, well I hope you're hungry. Um, fries. I have been |
| 1:37.2 | measuring these, I weighed them and I have, to be very precise, 157 grams worth of fries. |
| 1:43.3 | So I have almost or up to 90 individual fries in this one |
| 1:48.9 | packet, and it weighs about the same as yours. It's at the 150 range. Okay, so fries are about the same. |
| 1:54.8 | Well, I pop to the local shop to get myself a drink, soda, 500 milliliters. That's the kind of standard size bottle you would find for a fizzy drink in the UK. |
| 2:05.9 | So as you can see, mine's much bigger. |
... |
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