Smaller Size That

It would be easy to poke holes in a healthy eating program unveiled in Portland last week. The program, for example, has signed on 25 restaurants with hopes of netting 100 by the end of the year, a tiny portion of Maine’s restaurants. The biggest hole is that Maine’s top chef, Gov. John Baldacci, has yet to persuade his family’s eatery to sign up for the Diner’s Choice program.

However, these complaints miss the worthwhile point of the fledgling effort, funded by a $30,000 grant from the National Restaurant Association. Americans, and Mainers in particular, are getting fatter and fatter. They’re doing so because they don’t exercise enough and eat too much. The Maine Restaurant Association and Maine Bureau of Health have teamed up to do something about the latter.

They have a large task ahead of them as it will take a change in mindset to get many people to eat less. Their work is compounded by the fact that restaurant portion sizes have dramatically increased in recent decades. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this year found that between 1977 and 1996, food portion sizes increased both inside and outside the home for all categories except pizza. The researchers found that the typical hamburger grew from 5.7 ounces in the 1970s to an average of 7 ounces by the mid-1990s, adding 97 calories. A serving of french fries increased from 3.1 to 3.6 ounces, adding 68 calories and a typical serving of soft drink climbed 6.8 fluid ounces to 19.9 ounces. This resulted in an 11 percent increase in the average daily intake of calories.

Coupled with the concurrent drop in exercise rates, the results have been growing waistlines. The number of obese adults in Maine has increased by 50 percent in the last 10 years, with more than 56 percent of the state’s adults either overweight or obese, making Maine the heaviest state in New England.

The Bureau of Health is right to team up with restaurants, rather than work against them, to address this deadly trend. Diner’s Choice does this by helping eateries identify and promote healthy food choices. Some of the steps are small. Offering a half portion with the remainder wrapped up to take home, suggesting milk instead of soda for children and offering salsa as a potato topper instead of sour cream, for example.

These steps will be of minimal significance if fast food establishments, where Americans do the majority of their eating out, don’t sign on. So, it is encouraging that Dora Mills, director of the Bureau of Health, has already met with officials from McDonald’s.

As state Rep. Sean Faircloth pointed out last week, smaller portions and a restaurant staff more in tune with healthy food are not substitutes for restaurants making nutrition information readily available to diners, something he pushed for, unsuccessfully, in the state Legislature. Some restaurants already understand this, too. McDonald’s, for example, has added a feature to its Web site where people can add meal choices into a bag and tally the calorie count. Clearly, this information needs to be even more readily available.

As Dr. Mills says, Diner’s Choice is only one step down a long road. But it is a good start.