Apr 10
12
Overeating? You Aren’t Alone!
More than ever, we hear about the obesity epidemic and how it is related to increased risks of diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol levels, high triglycerides and other degenerative diseases.
However, the news reports on obesity have increased a lot in the past 4 years. Have you noticed?
Do you remember what it was like about 10 or even 20 years ago when it was not as common to see someone that was overweight? Sure, there were moms that never lost their baby weight and then seemed to pack on the pounds over the years. But at that time, it seemed that obesity was associated with people that were older than 50. There were still geographic areas of the world where you could visit that also seemed to have a higher number of people that were overweight. Mostly these were in the U.S. and they often seemed to be associated with lower income towns. The Pima Indians in Arizona had one of the highest reported rates of type 2 diabetes at that time and they still do.
Now it’s a different story. Visit almost any place in the U.S. and you’ll see lots of overweight and obese bodies. They’re at the grocery stores, at the schools, at the universities even in the nutrition departments, on the job, in executive positions, and at the medical offices as well.
Well, some researchers wanted to track meal sizes over the last 1000 years and two brothers, Brian and Craig Wansink, got together for a holiday meal one year and came up with a very unique way to solve the question.
They wrote this in the journal called the International Journal of Obesity: “If art imitates life and if food portions have been generally increasing with time, we might expect this trend to be reflected in paintings that depict food.
So what paintings did they go after to track food servings? None other than the famous Last Supper! As you know, the Last Supper is an artist’s rendition of the final meal the Jesus shared with his 12 apostles before the crucifixion. Brian and Wayne reasoned that the artists would have painted food on the Last Supper table that reflected the portion size of the current times. Pretty smart, huh? There’s nothing like out of the box thinking!
The brothers found 52 of the best-known Last Supper paintings from over the last 1000 years. And what they found is kind of amazing. Main courses increased in size by 69%. Plate size increased by 66%. And even the size of the loaf of bread increased by 23%.
These facts allowed the brothers to deduce that portion sizes have crept up through the years, and they aren’t something that blossomed out over just the last decade or last five years.
So there you have it. Obesity is our ancestors’ fault! ☺
