Fast food, dodgy infographics, implausible claims

The Daily Mail reported on Wednesday that US restaurant portion sizes had quadrupled(!) since the 1950s, a claim faithfully reproduced from the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) website.  The article comes complete with this infographic.

Now, it should be immediately obvious (if you remember your GCSE maths) that something is not quite right with this picture: the fountain soda looks truly enormous.  Taking the numbers in the diagram on faith for the moment (but see below), the volume of a cup has increased from 7 oz (200 ml) to 42 oz (1.25 l), a worrying factor of six increase.  In accordance with this, the 'NOW' cup on the diagram is 6 times taller than the 1950s cup.