Upsizing or supersizing – taking advantage of fast food restaurants” willingness to pile on lots more food for little more money – seems economically sound, but investigators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say it”s no bargain financially if the extra calories get stored as fat.

Rachel Naomi Close, a graduate student in the Nutritional Sciences Department working with nutritional scientist Dale Schoeller, calculated the additional costs that result from weight gain attributable to storing the extra calories of the average upsized meal versus the cost of the upsizing. Close presented the results April 4 at Experimental Biology 2005, as part of the scientific sessions of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. She estimated the costs based on published scientific literature combined with statistics obtained from federal and other websites.

Among fast food restaurants, a regular meal represents 927 calories, or 37 percent of a daily 2,500-calorie diet. The average upsizing adds an additional 397 calories. The extra food only costs, on average, an additional 67 cents.

But those 397 calories, on top of an already sufficient diet, are likely to be stored as 36 grams of added adipose tissue (a polite scientific term for fat), say the investigators – and weighing more has financial as well as health costs. The investigators only calculated three:
Increasing an individual”s fat content by 36 grams from that one meal increases auto fuel cost by five cents annually, based on the decreased miles per gallon efficiency in an automobile having a known amount of additional weight.
Becoming heavier means needing more calories to maintain energy requirements, and the fat storage from that one meal results in an extra 36 cents in maintenance food annually.
Health care costs rise with obesity, and the extra cost involved in the extra weight from that one meal adds, on average, $1.16 per year.

In other words, says Close, the 67-cent bargain of the one upsized meal gets wiped out over the year by the combined cost of $1.57 for these three variables. And of course, eating and storing extra calories from more upsized meals multiplies the costs.

“We discussed other potential items that could further drive up costs,” she says. “For example, having a bigger surface area means having to buy more soap, cosmetics, and clothes, but these were difficult to estimate. We hope these findings alone will help individuals think about upsized meals in a new way in addition to the more well publicized health risks and consequences.”

The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

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writer: Sylvia Wrobel (404) 325-8584, sylviawrobel@comcast.net