I'm a dietitian and I work in clinical weight-loss recently. Accurately estimating portion size is critical in research or real-world settings. For example, if you're trying to watch your weight and you're out to dinner and you're presented with a bowl of food, there's no really good way to actually estimate how much you're eating unless you're gonna whip some scales out of your bag. So we wanted to find a more objective way for people to quantify what they're eating when they're out and about. I came up with a more hands-on approach. We got people to measure the dimensions of the food using the width of their fingers and remembering back to primary school Math. We use the geometric volume formulas to estimate the weight of the food. To show you how this works, I've ordered a piece of lasagne and that's my box, a glass of wine and that's my cylinder. And I'm feeling pretty healthy, so I order some watermelon for dessert. And that's my wedge.
So this lasagne, it is seven by five, by four fingers. in the future, I see this method be incorporated into smartphone applications. So you put your fingers width in, along with your height and your weight. And the app will do all of the calculations for you. And then you've got a more accurate way to estimate the portion size.
There is an objective way for people to measure the food portion when they’re eating out, as the researcher believes that people can measure the dimension of food using their fingers. Moreover, the method should be incorporated into smartphone applications in the future, where people can enter their finger width measurements, as well as their height and weight so applications will do calculation to estimate appropriate food portion sizes.
