BUZZ: Movie Popcorn is Bad For You (Duh!)

I love reading headlines related to food and nutrition. This is what showed up on my Yahoo BUZZ today:

Horror at the Movies: Popcorn
by Claudine Zap (posted 21 Nov 2009)

We would want to be the last ones to ruin movie night, but this just in from Center for Science in the Public Interest: Chowing down on a medium popcorn and soda is the calorie equivalent to three McDonald's quarter-pounders and 12 — yes 12 — pats of butter. And it gets worse: About 90% of this 1,600 calorie bomb comes from fat.

‘Two Thumbs Down’ for Movie Theater Popcorn
(posted 18 Nov 2009)

New Lab Tests of Movie Theater Popcorn Show It’s Still the Godzilla of Snacks

WASHINGTON—It's hard to picture someone mindlessly ingesting three McDonald's Quarter Pounders with 12 pats of butter while watching a movie. But according to new laboratory analyses commissioned by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, that food is nutritionally comparable to what you’d find in a medium popcorn and soda combo at Regal, the country’s biggest movie theater chain: 1,610 calories and three days’ worth—60 grams—of saturated fat. (Nutrition aside, that combo costs $12—for raw ingredients that must cost Regal pennies.)

The study, published as the cover story in the December issue of Nutrition Action Healthletter, updates a famous exposé the group conducted 15 years ago. For Regal and AMC, CSPI tested samples from theaters in the Washington, D.C., area. For Cinemark, samples came from Texas, Illinois, and Maryland.

The oversized boxes and bags (four to five ounces) of candy sold at movie chains are universally high in calories. A 5-ounce bag of Twizzlers has 460 calories and 15 teaspoons of sugar. A 7-ounce box of Nerds has 790 calories and 46 teaspoons of sugar. Chocolate candies like Butterfinger Minis, Raisinets, Sno-Caps, or M&M's have between 400 and 500 calories and at least a half day’s worth of saturated fat. An 8-ounce bag of Reese's Pieces is just a cup of candy. But with 1,160 calories and 35 grams of saturated fat, it's like eating a 16-ounce T-bone steak plus a buttered baked potato.
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Another interesting thing about popcorn, is that eating it while watching a movie leads us into mindless eating. Tons of it. For some real interesting insights into portion size influencing our eating habits, take a read of this:

Big portions influence overeating as much as taste, even when the food tastes lousy, Cornell study finds
By Susan S. Lang (posted 5 Nov 2005)

Large portions push people to overeat -- even to overeat foods they don't like.

According to a new Cornell University study, when moviegoers were served stale popcorn in big buckets, they ate 34 percent more than those given the same stale popcorn in medium-sized containers. Tasty food created even larger appetites: Fresh popcorn in large tubs resulted in people eating 45 percent more than those given fresh popcorn in medium-sized containers.

"We're finding that portion size can influence intake as much as taste," said Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell. "Large packages and containers can lead to overeating foods we do not even find appealing."

Wansink and Junong Kim, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Central Florida, gave 158 moviegoers either medium (4.2 oz) or large (8.4 oz) tubs of free popcorn that was either fresh or 14 days old. The researchers asked the moviegoers to describe the popcorn after the movie, and they weighed how much popcorn was left in the containers. As expected, the 14-day-old popcorn was described with such remarks as "stale" and "it was terrible."

When the moviegoers were asked if they thought they ate more because of the size of the container, 77 percent of those given the large tubs said they would have eaten the same amount if given a medium container. "This means that the moviegoers were unaware that the exceptional amount they ate was due to the size of the container," said Wansink, who also is the author of the new book, "Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity," and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, made up of a group of interdisciplinary researchers who have conducted more than 200 studies on the psychology behind what people eat and how often they eat it.

Several of Wansink's previous studies show that larger portions prompt people to eat more not because of a clean-your-plate mentality, but because large packages and portions suggest larger consumption norms. "They implicitly suggest what might be construed as a 'normal' or 'appropriate' amount to consume," said Wansink, who tested this concept in 1996 with volunteers given different-sized bags of M&Ms that were too large to be finished while watching a videotape; those given larger bags ate twice as much as those with smaller bags.
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For some interesting reading, I highly recommend his book Mindless Eating – Why We Eat More Than We Think, by Brian Wansink. Published by Bantam-Dell (2006).

So what do I eat at the movies? Sometimes I brought in my own snacks (grapes or raisins; one evening I even packed an entire dinner in to-go containers and used a big purse). But lately I just don't get anything to eat or drink. It's not like we're going to starve during the 2 hr show. It's one way to break that behavior change of tv & movies connected to food & eating. And think of all the money you save by skipping the snack bar.