The study has warned that cooking meals at home is not always healthy-especially if you are relying on cookbooks to prepare food.
The novel study, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, says fast food is not the only culprit behind Americans' growing waistlines.
The surging obesity rate in the United States is partly due to the calorie counts in several classic recipes that have risen to a higher level over the years, according to study authors Brian Wansink, PhD, of Cornell University and Collin Payne, PhD, of New Mexico State University.
"When we talk about obesity, people like to plant the source of the issue on away-from-home dining," said Wansink. "But that raised the thought in my mind: Is that really the source of things?. . . . What has happened in what we've been doing in our own homes over the years?"
For the study, the pair of researchers first looked at how classic recipes changed over the past 70 years. They focused on 18 recipes that appeared in the seven editions of "Joy of Cooking," the American kitchen icon, published in 1936, 1946, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1997, and 2006.
The 18 recipes that qualified and from which researchers drew their data included: chicken gumbo, corn chowder, plain omelet, Spanish rice, chicken a la king, goulash, biscuits, blueberry muffins, cornbread, brownies, sugar cookies, rice pudding, tapioca pudding, baked macaroni, waffles, apple pie, chocolate cake, and chili con carne.
After reviewing the every recipe published in all the seven editions of the so called American kitchen icon Joy of Cooking, Wansink and Payne found that portion distortion, the trend of consuming huge portions in almost every eating situation, contributed to nearly 40 percent increase in calories or 77 more calories per serving for almost every recipe.
The researchers found, of the 18 recipes 17 increased in calories per serving since the 1936 edition. The one recipe that remained unchanged through the years was the chili con carne.
"That (calorie increases) is more insidious because that's the sort if thing the average person wouldn't notice, wouldn't even think would have happened over the years," Wansink and Payne say.
"The serving size and calorie composition of classic recipes needs to be downsized to counteract growing waistlines."
Today, Obesity has become a burning issue in many of the countries. It is a serious, deadly and a common health problem, which can further make an individual more vulnerable to other diseases. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in America, where more than 55 million adults are obese.
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