Some people have too much time.
Leave it to Colbert to spoof this:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-col...rate-scamwhich
Putin khuliyo
Yeah, I'm with Pendulous here. If your "footlong" sub is within ~10% of the putative length, no biggie. Really, they should manufacture them such that the average is 12 inches, so people are occasionally getting more.
Really though, every restaurant that offers fresh baked bread, bakes it from frozen dough slugs, which pre-measured or not, the fact is that it's really impossible to predict just how much a particular loaf will expand. If you want to accurately grade that fact, you would need to control the study for atmospheric pressure, which I somehow doubt this particular study has been.
In Canada we call it a footlong still for this exact reason.
EDIT: Also, because the dough slugs are pre-measured it doesn't matter how much it ends up actually rising, the caloric value is exactly the same really. So it's not like you're getting ripped off if a dough slug, designed to rise into a 12" loaf of bread, only becomes 11" because higher atmospheric pressure when it was baked prevented it from doing so completely.
Getting less of what should be categorized as sandwich garbage is probably a good thing. Subway is the dumpster of sandwich shops.
What do you find unhealthy about a Subway sub? A six inch ham and turkey sub has 290 calories, 4 grams of fat, 46 grams of carbs, 5 grams of fiber, 8 grams of sugars, 20 grams of protein, and a decent scattering of vitamins. As a runner, eating the footlong version is basically the perfect breakdown of nutrition for me. It's a bit high in sodium, but nothing particularly unusual.
It's called Cheeseburger Royale in Switzerland. I'm dead serious. http://www.mcdonalds.ch/de/menuekart...seburger-royal
And I haven't been in Subway for a while, but it wouldn't cross my mind to measure them. It's plenty of food either way.