And what is with all of the fried chicken products being created and produced in the last few years? I don't get it. The food producers are taking chicken, which is quite healthy when it is grilled, baked or broiled, and creating dozens of new ways to make it unhealthy, invovling changing the shape, coating it, frying it, saucing it, and so on. Go to a restaurant and look at the entree salads, and the chicken on the salads are all coated and deep fat fried. It isn't just that portions are getting bigger, but the food producers are actively trying to put more unhealthy calories into the food by creating new ways to add fat and salt to regular food, and then we see the resulting commercials on television.

Yes, that sandwich commercial is the worse, the one with the meat piled up. A portion size in a sandwich is 1-3 ounces, depending on what else is in the sandwich, not piled up inches thick.

The original poster mentioned the show "The Biggest Loser." I like that show because it shows how the overweight people got heavy, mostly for some of the reasons discussed in this thread, and I think it is important for people to understand how they got overweight. A person can't lose weight permanently until they understand how and why their body got big and make the permanent life-time behavior changes that will allow them to successfully lose the excess pounds. As the participants on the show are taught basic nutrition and exercise, so do the viewers in the television audience learn nutrition and exercise, and that is a good thing. I think the show is positive and affirming, and hopefully gives hope to many people to learn proper heart healthy nutrition and exercise behaviors.

One thing that many people don't know as they flounder around trying to learn about nutrition is that almost every hospital in North America has a three-month program teaching heart healthy nutrition to anybody who signs up for the class. A person's health insurance will pay for the fees if the doctor says it is ok, like if a person has hypertension, or insulin insensitivity, or is overweight, or if there is a dependant person in the household with similar problams. If not, pay the fees and go through the course anyway. These classes are not diet programs, but instead are designed to teach people how to be healthy with their nutrition and exercise, and how to recognize that measuring their cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar can be even more important indicators of their overall health than their weight.

If a person eats and exercises so as to keep their cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar as healthy as possible, then eventually a lot of the excess body fat will burn off until the body reaches a fat/muscle/bone density ratio that is appropriate for that person's sex, age and activity level. So what if the time line is years, and not months. It is better than dying decades early because your body is clogged with cholesterol. For the record, I had two friends die in the last year because their bodies were so clogged with cholesterol the doctors couldn't even do a bypass surgery. Both individuals had a total cholesterol of around 220, and were not even on a statin drug. When I told them repeatedly that their cholesterol was too high, they said oh no, that 220 was a good number. Huh? And now they are dead.

Darcy