How many calories are in a medium-size muffin? I’ll give you a minute to think.
The answer is about 520 — probably more than many people think. In contrast, a handful of almonds has 160 calories. To put this in perspective: replacing a morning muffin snack with a handful of nuts every day for a year would cut 131,400 calories, or about 35 pounds.
Despite these large differences — and despite the facts that a third of U.S. adults are obese and an estimated 63 percent of obese individuals are trying to lose weight — most people do not know much about how many calories they are eating. In one study of consumers in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, researchers found that consumers at fast-food chains underestimated the number of calories in the meal they purchased by about 200 calories. Only 15 percent of people surveyed stated an estimate within 100 calories of the content of their meal.
Notably, however, people who do pay attention to calories tend to buy fewer of them. (It’s possible these people do not actually eat less; all the studies I’ll discuss here focus on how many calories people buy, not how many they eat.) A highly cited study from 2008 in the American Journal of Public Health compared customers of the sandwich chain Subway who said they paid attention to calorie labels to those who said they did not. The study found that those who paid attention bought 52 fewer calories on average; that’s a little more than a third of a 12-ounce soda. It’s not a huge number, but if someone made this change every day, they could lose up to 5 pounds in a year.
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