Question: You often write about servings of healthy foods. But what is a serving? Is it measured by weight, volume or cup, for instance? And are servings for fruit, nuts, red meat, whole grains, etc, all measured similarly?
Answer: What Costco calls a muffin would almost have qualified as a family-sized cake during my childhood in the 1970s and 80s. And muffins are not the only “growing” food in New Zealand: a 2018 study by the University of Auckland found that fast-food serving sizes increased significantly during the 2010s. If these changes confirm one thing, it’s that serving sizes are a moving target. They also vary widely between countries according to different food traditions, a recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health noted. For example, a serving of pasta is defined as 80g of raw pasta in Italy. In contrast, our Ministry of Health defines a serving as 1 cup of cooked pasta –about 56g of uncooked pasta.
The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code does not define a standard serving size. This is the code that sets legal requirements for the labelling, composition, safety, handling, primary production and processing of food here and across the Tasman. With no defined serving sizes in the code, there are no regulations on the serving sizes used on the nutrition information panel that appears on food packaging.
The only guidance that Food Standards Australia New Zealand (the agency responsible for the code) provides is that serving sizes specified by a food business should reflect a realistic portion of the food a person would typically consume on one eating occasion. So, although one cereal manufacturer might consider a third of a cup of muesli a standard serving size, another might specify something different.
The Ministry of Health does provide some guidance for serving sizes in its document “Eating and Activity Guidelines for New Zealand Adults”, along with recommendations on how many servings a day adults should eat.
Our recommended daily quantity of nutritious foods (see panel) is five or more servings of fruit and vegetables (three of veges, two of fruit); six servings or more of grain foods; two or more of milk and milk products (ideally low- or reduced-fat); and at least two servings of legumes, nuts and seeds or at least one of fish or other seafood, eggs, poultry or red meat.
However, the guidelines do not consider the wide variance in energy needs for adults of different sizes, metabolisms and activity levels. So, although a highly active young man might easily eat the recommended daily servings of fruit and veges and grain foods daily, an inactive, petite older woman would not need nearly as much.
To further confuse matters, these serving sizes are sometimes given as metric cup measures, others in grams or litres.
All of this makes determining a standard serving a bit of guesswork unless you’re armed with a set of kitchen scales and metric cup measures as you prepare your meal. So, we can rightly conclude that standard food-serving sizes are a pretty loose guideline rather than a rigid set of regulations.
In summary, the goal is to enjoy a variety of nutritious foods every day, including plenty of vegetables and fruit, grain foods – mostly whole grain and those naturally high in fibre – some reduced-fat milk and milk products, and some legumes, nuts, seeds and other protein sources.
How you mix this up, and precisely what quantities you require, will come down to your personal energy needs: listening to your body’s hunger and fullness cues will guide you.
