{"id":3334,"date":"2010-04-02T06:00:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T04:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ultimatefatburner.com\/?p=3334"},"modified":"2015-02-15T09:25:58","modified_gmt":"2015-02-15T14:25:58","slug":"what-would-jesus-eat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/what-would-jesus-eat\/","title":{"rendered":"What Would Jesus Eat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, I’m not quite sure of what to make of this latest… well, “study” by Brian Wansink, the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think<\/a>.”\u00a0 I’m going to let this LA Times article<\/a> provide a synopsis…<\/p>\n

In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American fare, a pair of sibling scholars has turned to an unusual source: 52 artists’ renderings of the New Testament’s Last Supper.<\/p>\n

Their findings, published online Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity, indicate that serving sizes have been marching heavenward for 1,000 years.<\/p>\n

…To reach their conclusion, Wansink and his brother Craig, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, analyzed 52 depictions of the meal the Wansinks call “history’s most famous dinner party” painted between the year 1000 and the year 2000.<\/p>\n

Using the size of the diners’ heads as a basis for comparison, the Wansinks used computers to compare the sizes of the plates in front of the apostles, the food servings on those plates and the bread on the table. Assuming that heads did not increase in size during the second millennium after the birth of Christ, the researchers used this method to gauge how much serving sizes increased.<\/p>\n

And increase they did.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the millennium, the Wansinks found that the entrees depicted on the plates laid before Jesus’ followers grew by about 70%, and the bread by 23%.<\/p>\n

As entree portions rose, so too did the size of the plates — by 65.6%.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I “get” Wansink’s point – that “portion distortion” may not be a recent phenomenon, but so what?\u00a0 What does the\u00a0amount of food that\u00a0Leonardo DaVinci painted on Jesus’ plate in 1498 tell us about how to help people now? Your average person in Renaissance Italy wasn’t overweight or obese.\u00a0This study\u00a0reads like\u00a0a scientific version of “Trivial Pursuit.”<\/p>\n

I dunno, maybe the editors of the International Society of Obesity<\/a> thought\u00a0it might be appropriate for the first week of April… in the article, another researcher refers to the study as “fun.” But it doesn’t really read as if it’s being played for laughs… in fact, it looks more like a waste of time and perfectly good paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, I’m not quite sure of what to make of this latest… well, “study” by Brian Wansink, the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24,28],"tags":[1863,1236,1300],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3334"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9043,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334\/revisions\/9043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}