Sometimes, says Jeffrey Kluger in his Time article “Dieters Beware: Calorie Counts Are Frequently Off” (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951798,00.html).
Kluger begins his article by saying, “When you buy a car with a six-cylinder engine, you expect to get six cylinders,” and I agree. Not that I’ve ever been afford a car with six-cylinders, but when I can, they had better all be there.
Kluger goes on to say, “When you buy a dress in a size 10, you expect a size 10.”
Not necessarily, Mr. Kluger.
I’m pretty sure when you buy a dress in a size 10, you expect a size 12. This is what we call vanity sizing. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s probably because you’re a man, but we women depend on it. I’m a size 6 in the real world, but at The Gap, I’m a size 4. You know what size I am at Target? A size 2. I can hardly stop patting myself on the back when I shop there.
It’s crazy, I know, but flattering, and that’s what vanity sizing is all about. Women admit it. Clothes designers admit it too. Nobody cares that it’s all made up. It’s in our female DNA that we’d rather buy a size 10 pair of pants from Brand A over a size 12 pair of pants from Brand B, even if they’re in the wrong color, which is why so many women have closets full of nothing to wear. Practically everything is in the wrong color.
So it’s not surprising, to me at least, that calorie counts are sometimes off. I mean, think about it. If we’re going to vanity size the clothes, we might as well vanity size the food that got us in this predicament in the first place.
Mr. Kruger gets another thing wrong. He says that the study, which appears in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, is based on the findings of Susan Roberts, “author of the book The Instant Diet.” The book is actually called The Instinct Diet. Not that I’m pushing her book, having written one of my own.
The point is, a lot of stuff falls through the cracks. If restaurants can get away with underestimating calorie counts by as much as 18%, as the study suggests, you can be sure they’ll do it. And Americans, who have it in their DNA to order the Bloomin’ Onion, will go along.
