Pizza pies were 10 inches in diameter back in the 1970s. Today Pizza Hut offers the Full House XL Pizza, which is a 16-inch pie. Little Caesars sells the Big! Big! Pizza, with the largest measuring from 16 to 18 inches with a slogan that says: "Bigger is better!" Both Pizza Hut and Little Caesars have discontinued the 10-inch pie.
7-Eleven stores started selling 12-and 20-ounce sodas in the early 1970s. By 1988 they were selling the 64-ounce Double Gulp, a half-gallon of soda marketed for one person.
The famous Hershey chocolate bar weighed 0.6 ounce its first year on the market. Now, the standard bar weight is 1.6 ounces, almost three times its original weight.
Even diet food has grown in size; in the mid-1990s, Weight Watchers introduced Smart Ones, with larger portion sizes, and Lean Cuisine offered Hearty Portions, which is a heftier frozen dinner, with 100 more calories. The irony of diet food that advertised bigger sizes with more calories seems lost in the diet industry.
At Starbucks the Short cup of coffee, at 8 ounces, is no longer on the menu. The smallest size is Tall, a 12-ounce cup that is nearly twice as big as what used to be considered a regular cup of coffee.
When Chef America added 10 percent more filling to its microwave sandwich Hot Pockets while keeping the price the same, sales increased by 32 percent.
In the course of just three years between 1984 and 1987 the exact same chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of the Nestlé's TOLL HOUSE Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels packaged scaled down the number of cookies it makes from 100 to 60.
The average adult weighed nearly 25 pounds more, yet was only about an inch taller in 2002 than in 1960 according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
When asked to take spaghetti from different size boxes to make dinner for two, women took 302 spaghetti strands when given a 2-pound box but only 234 strands when given a 1-pound box. (One ½-cup serving of pasta is 32 spaghetti strands.)
When frying chicken, women poured 4.3 ounces of cooking oil from a 32-ounce bottle, but only 3.5 ounces from a 16-ounce bottle.
Moviegoers who said that the popcorn tasted stale still ate 61 percent more than when given a larger container than a smaller one. Even when it doesn't taste great, people still eat more out of a large container…
Sizzler offers the "granddaddy of them all," a 24-ounce porterhouse steak. Steak lovers beware-this steak contains more than three days' worth of meat according to USDA recommendations. The Lone Star Café features the sirloin steak challenge, a 72-ounce steak, "which separates the men from the boys," and is free if you can finish it, along with its trimmings, in less than one hour. This is nine full days' worth of meat.
A glass of wine at a restaurant or a bar is most likely twice as large as it was in the 1970s.
In 1988 the original Lunchables was small and contained 340 calories. By the year 2000, Oscar Mayer introduced the Lunchables Mega Pack, containing 640 calories for the pizza version and 780 calories for the nacho version.
When Thomas' English Muffins introduced Sandwich Size English muffins, which are 65 percent larger than their regular size, sales went up 2,500 percent.
The original Kellogg's Raisin Bran box in 1942 was 15 ounces. Today the jumbo box is 25.5 ounces.
To get started on the "portion teller plan" log onto www.portionteller.com.