Dr. Kirschenbaum’s most recent book (2011), an updated version of his Healthy Obsession Program book. To order a copy, just click on the image of the book.

The Wellspring Weight-Loss Plan outlines the weight-loss program of the same name that has helped thousands of teens lose weight and find happiness. This plan is built on three principles: science, simplicity, and sustainability and follows the 3-1-8 plan:

• 3 Simple Behavioral Goals: eat as little fat as possible, walk at least 10,000 steps per day, and write down your eating and activities
• 1 Challenging Mission: to develop a “healthy obsession”
• 8 Steps to Developing a Healthy Obsession: Make the Decision; Know the Enemy—Your Biology; Eat to Lose; Find Lovable Foods that Love You Back; Move to Lose; Self-Monitor and Plan Consistently; Understand and Manage Stress—With and Without Food; and Use Slump Busters to Overcome Slumps

Hundreds of news and television stories around the world have followed the development of Wellspring’s programs, starting with two camps in the summer of 2004 and expanding to 12 programs in the summer of 2010. From Wellspring Camps to Wellspring Academies (the world’s first boarding schools for overweight teenagers) to Wellspring Vacations and Retreats (eight-day programs for adults), Wellspring participants learn to master the 3-1-8 approach described in The Wellspring Weight-Loss Plan.

Find out why this program works and use it to transform the lives of teens you know.

Does excess weight help cushion a car crash? A few researchers decided to test this hypothesis out using crash dummies in simulated car crashes. Check out what they found…

April 4, 2010 |  6:00 am

Los Angeles Times

Some people believe obesity provides a cushioning effect in car crashes, with the extra padding helping to protect people against severe trauma. A few researchers set out to see if that’s true, using crash test dummies in simulated frontal crashes.

But they didn’t use just any crash test dummies. The researchers used three obese and five normal-weight cadavers, since, according to the study, obese crash test dummies don’t exist. Who knew?

The dummies were put into a simulated mid-size car that crashed at about 30 mph, to see how they responded to the force. The obese test subjects, who wore seat belts but had no air bags, had greater maximum forward pitch than their non-obese counterparts before being stopped by the seat belt.

Also, parts of their bodies experienced different trajectories–the obese dummies’ hips slid forward more, allowing their torsos to not fall forward as much. That may protect obese people’s heads from hitting the inside of the car, but may also cause more injury to the ribs and lungs, since the load is concentrated on the lower part of the thorax, closer to the abdomen. Since the hips move forward more, the lower extremities might also be more vulnerable.

So no, obese people don’t seem to have a definite advantage in car crashes. In another study, obese men had worse outcomes in sustaining upper body injuries in car crashes versus normal-weight men. So buckle up, everyone.

CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

APRIL 4, 2010 12:02 PM

The evolutionary impulses that allowed our ancestors to survive on the Savannah are sabotaging us in the modern world, finds groundbreaking new research.

According to Deirdre Barrett, a clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, our lingering primal urges have helped give rise to the obesity epidemic, social isolation, poor risk-assessment tendencies and sex addiction, among countless other things. All because our biology hasn’t caught up to the way we live.

“We still have Stone-Age brains inside contemporarily clothed bodies,” says Barrett, author of the new book Supernormal Stimuli. “So we can’t really trust our instincts; we need to trust our intellects.”

The problem, of course, is that most of us don’t. And according to Barrett’s studies, it’s because we’re governed by the same knee-jerk behaviour as so-called “dumb animals.”

Just as a songbird has been shown to prefer fake eggs over its own real ones, simply because the phonies offer an exaggerated version of reality — brighter colours, embellished markings, larger in size — so, too, are humans duped by their own instincts.

“When we see animals trying to mate with a little cardboard cylinder just because it has the right stripes on the side, it looks really silly to us,” says Barrett. “But magazine pornography isn’t any less unrealistic a depiction of a real woman.”

Because most big genetic changes take 10,000 years or more to pass, she says humans are still coded to respond to their environment in very primitive ways. Once-scarce fat, salt and sugar, for instance, is still pursued today, to the point of excess, despite the fact it’s become widely available.

“Our genes haven’t had time to stop craving those things and start craving green, leafy vegetables, which were around us all the time on the Savannah and didn’t need to be prioritized,” says Barrett.

Our social instincts are as easily fooled — and again, to our detriment — by TV’s exaggerated versions of things we naturally seek out.

“We have very attractive actors smiling at us, and laugh tracks playing, and funny quips coming faster than they ever could in real life,” says Barrett. “All the things that are meant to pull us into a social interaction but, in fact, are pulling us toward a television set.”

Even our ability to detect threats is affected, with Barrett noting people are likelier to gasp at a horror movie or picture of a giant gorilla than news of global warming, which wasn’t an obvious danger to our ancestors.

Because evolution won’t ever catch up to our changing times, she says the best we can do is to recognize what’s happening and try to behave logically.

“We have the tools to handle this, with our superior intellect and brain power,” says Barrett. “The problem is that we act reflexively most of the time.”

By CARLA K. JOHNSON
The Associated Press
Monday, April 5, 2010; 4:33 PM

CHICAGO — One hour of moderate to vigorous exercise a day can help teens beat the effects of a common obesity-related gene with the nickname “fatso,” according to a new European study.

The message for adolescents is to get moving, said lead author Jonatan Ruiz of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

“Be active in your way,” Ruiz said. “Activities such as playing sports are just fine and enough.”

The study, released Monday, appears in the April edition of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The research supports U.S. guidelines that tell children and teenagers to get an hour or more of physical activity daily, most of it aerobic activity such as running, jumping rope, swimming, dancing and bicycling.

Scientists are finding evidence that both lifestyle and genes cause obesity and they’re just learning how much diet and exercise can offset the inherited risk.

One gene involved with obesity, the FTO gene, packs on the pounds when it shows up in a variant form. Adults who carry two copies of the gene variant – about 1 in 6 people – weigh on average 7 pounds more than people who don’t.

In the new study, 752 teenagers, who had their blood tested for the gene variant, wore monitoring devices for a week during waking hours to measure their physical activity.

Exercising an hour or more daily made a big difference for the teens who were genetically predisposed to obesity. Their waist measurements, body mass index scores and body fat were the same, on average, as the other teenagers with regular genes.

But the teens with the gene variant had more body fat, bigger waists and higher BMI if they got less than an hour of exercise daily. The results were similar for boys and girls.

The teens lived in Greece, Germany, Belgium, France, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, Austria and Spain. The study was funded by the Spanish and Swedish governments and the European Union.

The new study found that most of the teenagers had at least one copy of the variant gene. Only 37 percent had regular genes. The rest had either one of two copies of the pesky fatso gene.

An earlier study in Amish adults in Lancaster County, Pa., found they needed three to four hours of moderate activity daily to beat the gene. The adults in that study did things like brisk walking, housecleaning and gardening.

The teens in the new study may have exercised more vigorously than the Amish adults, Ruiz said. The new analysis was designed to see whether the current U.S. guidelines – which specify a moderate to vigorous level of exercise for an hour a day – made a difference for kids.

The lead author of the Amish study, Evadnie Rampersaud of the University of Miami, said the new findings are “very interesting” because they suggest one hour daily spent exercising can be enough for teenagers at risk.

University of Miami researchers now are studying adults in an employee wellness program to see what it takes for them to overcome the fatso gene, Rampersaud said.

“The message is clear: genes are not destiny,” said Dr. Alan Shuldiner of the University of Maryland, a co-author of the Amish study. “Those with obesity susceptibility genes should be especially motivated to engage in a physically active lifestyle.”

It would appear that everyone is aware of the obesity epidemic by this point. It is portrayed as a recent occurrence, but this is not the case. John Komlos and Marek Brabec find that obesity rates began rising a long time ago and explain factors that may have contributed to this precursor to today’s obesity epidemic.

By FREAKONOMICS

New York Times

The obesity epidemic is generally portrayed as a relatively recent phenomenon, but new research paints a different picture.  John Komlos and Marek Brabec find that obesity rates actually began rising in the early 20th century, with significant upsurges after the two World Wars.  The authors point out that “the ‘creeping’ nature of the epidemic, as well as its persistence, does suggest that its roots have been embedded deep in the social fabric and are nourished by a network of disparate sources…”  Komlos and Brabec point to factors like the industrialization of food production, the spread of automobiles, the spread of the media, the IT revolution, and the growing culture of consumption in America to explain the trend.

HERE is the source from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

The Trend of Mean BMI Values of US Adults, Birth Cohorts 1882-1986 Indicates that the Obesity Epidemic Began Earlier than Hitherto

John Komlos, Marek Brabec

NBER Working Paper No. 15862*
Issued in April 2010 NBER Program(s):   HE

The trend in the BMI values of the US population has not been estimated accurately because time series data are unavailable and because the focus has been on calculating period effects. In contrast to the prevailing strategies, we estimate the trend and rate of change of BMI values by birth cohorts stratified by gender and ethnicity born 1882-1986. We use loess additive regression models to estimate age and trend effects of BMI values of US-born black and white adults measured between 1959 and 2006. We use all the NHES and NHANES survey data and find that the increase in BMI was already underway among the birth cohorts of the early 20th century. The rate of increase was fastest among black females; for the three other groups under consideration, the rates of increase were similar. The generally persistent upward trend was punctuated by upsurges, particularly after each of the two World Wars. That the estimated rate of change of BMI values increased by 71% among black females between the birth cohorts 1955 and those of 1965 is indicative of the rapid increases in their weight. We infer that transition to post-industrial weights was a gradual process and began considerably earlier than hitherto supposed.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 7, 2010) — Obesity can be detected in infants as young as 6 months, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

By analyzing the electronic medical records of babies seen for routine “well-child” visits to the UTMB pediatric clinic, the investigators found that about 16 percent of 6-month-olds fit the study’s criterion for obesity — a weight-for-length ratio that put them in the top 5 percent of all babies in their age group. (Weight for length was used instead of the conventional body mass index because BMI is based on weight and height as measured while standing, which neither 6-month-olds nor 24-month-olds can do well enough to measure.) Further analysis of the records indicated that obese 2-year-olds were much more likely to have been obese at 6 months than 2-year-olds who were not obese.

The obese babies’ medical records rarely showed that clinicians had addressed the issue at either 6-month or 24-month visits, despite a well-established connection between obesity at a young age and obesity later in life, which is linked to such serious health problems as diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.

“Until very recently, pediatricians really haven’t been focusing on obesity in babies,” said Dr. David McCormick, UTMB clinical professor of pediatrics and senior author of the study, “Infant Obesity: Are We Ready to Make this Diagnosis?” which is now online in the Journal of Pediatrics. “We’re just getting a handle on it descriptively right now. What we’re hoping to do is alert our colleagues and our parents. If we address weight management through nutrition and exercise as early in life as possible, it’s going to work a lot better.”

According to McCormick, pediatricians confronting infant obesity can recommend a number of measures that other research has shown are linked to healthy weight, measures that should be particularly effective because babies’ mothers have much more control over their diets than mothers of older children do.

“Studies have shown that exclusive breastfeeding — breastfeeding alone, not breastfeeding combined with bottle-feeding — prevents obesity,” McCormick said. “Getting enough fiber — eating apples instead of drinking apple juice, for example — also helps keep babies on track to a healthy weight. By contrast, improper early introduction of cereal by adding it to an infant’s bottle promotes obesity.”

McCormick observed that maternal data collected in his group’s investigation matched well with other studies of children and adolescents that showed higher odds of obesity among boys and girls whose mothers were already obese before becoming pregnant or who gained an excessive amount of weight during pregnancy. Such results, he said, added even more urgency to the need to deal with childhood weight issues effectively and address what could be a multigenerational cycle of obesity.

“We need to do a lot better as clinicians and educators at getting our community educated and working through the entire age spectrum, because babies who are overweight are more likely to be overweight children and adolescents, and then later, when obese women are ready to have a family, their babies are more likely to become obese,” McCormick said. “We need to deal with this through all ages and through pregnancy, because if a woman is already overweight when she becomes pregnant, it’s extremely difficult for her to do anything about her weight at that point.”

Mon, Mar 29 2010

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – American children aren’t the only couch potatoes with nearly one third of children globally spending three hours a day or more watching TV or on computers, according to study of over 70,000 teens in 34 nations.

From Argentina to Zambia, Regina Guthold of the World Health Organization in Geneva and her colleagues found most children aren’t getting enough exercise and it made no difference if they lived in a rich or a poor country.

“With regards to physical activity levels, we did not find much of a difference between poor and rich countries,” Guthold told Reuters Health. “Growing up in a poor country does not necessarily mean that kids get more physical activity.”

The study, published in The Journal of Pediatrics, looking at 72,845 schoolchildren aged 13 to 15 from North and South America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The children were surveyed between 2003 and 2007.

The researchers defined adequate physical activity as at least an hour of exercise outside of gym class at least five days a week.

Children who spent three or more hours a day watching TV, playing computer games, or chatting with friends — aside from time in school or time spent doing homework — were classified as sedentary.

The researchers found only one quarter of the boys and 15 percent of the girls were getting enough exercise by these definitions.

A quarter of boys and nearly 30 percent of girls were sedentary and didn’t get enough exercise with girls less active than boys in every country aside from Zambia.

Uruguay had the highest percentage of active boys, at 42 percent, while Zambia had the lowest, at 8 percent.

Girls from India were the most active, with 37 percent meeting exercise recommendations, while girls from Egypt were the least active, with just 4 percent getting adequate exercise.

Children in Myanmar were the least sedentary, with 13 percent of boys and 8 percent of girls classified as sedentary. The most sedentary nations were St. Lucia and the Cayman Islands, with 58 percent of boys and 64 percent of girls spending at least three hours a day in sedentary activities.

While the study didn’t look at the reasons behind the lack of physical activity in various nations, Guthold speculated that urbanization could be a factor as well as access to cars and TVs.

She said schools can help children become more active by having physical education classes and educating students about the importance of exercise.

Adding lanes for bicycles, pedestrian crossings and other changes to promote walking and biking to and from school could help too, she added.

“Even with the limitations that questionnaire data (suffer) from, I guess it’s pretty safe to say that we have a huge problem with physical inactivity among schoolchildren around the globe and that we should take action,” said Guthold.

Does workplace stress contribute to obesity? A recent study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in January of 2010, investigated the correlation between chronic job stress, lack of physical activity and obesity. Lead author Diana Fernandez, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the URMC Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, said her study is among many that associate high job pressure with cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, depression, exhaustion, anxiety and weight gain. When the prevalence of overweight and obesity are combined, 68 percent of adults fit the category, according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which makes this issue particularly important as obesity is affecting many people.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2010) — A new study that provides a snapshot of a typical American workplace observed that chronic job stress and lack of physical activity are strongly associated with being overweight or obese.

Unexpectedly, researchers also found that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables did little to offset the effect of chronic job stress on weight gain among the employees, who were mostly sedentary. Instead, exercise seemed to be the key to managing stress and keeping a healthy weight.

University of Rochester Medical Center researchers conducted the study of 2,782 employees at a large manufacturing facility in upstate New York, but the results could be applicable to almost any job situation in which layoffs, or lack of control at work, is a major concern.

The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine published the research in January 2010.

Lead author Diana Fernandez, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the URMC Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, said her study is among many that associate high job pressure with cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, depression, exhaustion, anxiety and weight gain. It’s time to improve corporate policies that better protect the health of workers, she said.

“In a poor economy, companies should take care of the people who survive layoffs and end up staying in stressful jobs,” Fernandez said. “It is important to focus on strengthening wellness programs to provide good nutrition, ways to deal with job demands, and more opportunities for physical activity that are built into the regular workday without penalty.”

Over and over, Fernandez’s team heard the same story from the upstate workers: After spending the day sitting in stressful meetings or at their computers, they looked forward to going home and “vegging out” in front of the TV. Anecdotally, researchers also discovered that when pink slips were circulating, the snacks highest in fats and calories would disappear quickest from the vending machines. Some workers said they did not take the time to eat well or exercise at lunch because they were fearful of repercussions from leaving their desks for too long.

Approximately 32 percent of adult men and 35 percent of adult women are obese in this country. When the prevalence of overweight and obesity are combined, 68 percent of adults fit the category (72 percent prevalence among men; 64 percent among women), according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The upstate New York workplace mirrored the national statistics. Researchers collected baseline data from the nearly 2,800 employees, using body mass index (BMI) as the measurement for weight status. Overweight/obesity was defined as BMI greater than 24.9, and healthy/underweight was defined as less than 24.9.

They found that 72 to 75 percent of the employees were overweight or obese. Most of the study volunteers were middle-aged, white, married, highly educated (college degree or more), relatively well-paid (earning more than $60,000 a year), with an average of almost 22 years at the company.

Another important statistic: More than 65 percent of the employees said they watched two or more hours of television per day. Among those who reported watching two to three hours, 77 percent were more likely to be overweight or obese, and those who watched four or more hours of TV a day increased their odds of obesity by 150 percent, compared to people who watched less than two hours of daily TV.

“We are not sure why TV is so closely associated with being overweight in our sample group of people,” Fernandez said. “Other studies have shown that adults tend to eat more fatty foods while watching TV. But this requires more investigation.”

The study dates back to 2005, amid growing concern of an obesity epidemic, when Fernandez was awarded a $3 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to investigate ways to influence people’s dietary and physical activity at work. The company that agreed to participate was involved in drastic restructuring and layoffs. In interviews the employees confided to researchers that they were “stress eating” and burned out from “doing the work of five people,” researchers reported.

Stressful working conditions are known to impact health behaviors directly and indirectly. Directly, stress can affect the neuroendocrine system, resulting in abdominal fat, for example, or it may cause a decrease in sex hormones, which often leads to weight gain. Indirectly stress is linked to the consumptions of too many fatty or sugary foods and inactivity.

The research team measured psychosocial work conditions through a detailed job questionnaire. Interventions were planned and employees who worked at intervention worksites participated in a comprehensive, two-year nutrition and exercise program. This included walking routes at work, portion control in food, and stress-reduction workshops. The data comparing control groups and the groups who took part in the nutrition and exercise program is still being analyzed, Fernandez said.

However, while analyzing baseline data investigators discovered that employees working in the most high-job-strain conditions had almost one BMI unit more of weight than people who worked in more passive areas. Researchers did not find that chronic stressors (general dissatisfaction at work) and acute stressors (being a layoff survivor, or having entire operations decommissioned) together had a larger effect on weight than when examined independently.

Diet was evaluated solely by the number of servings of fruits and vegetables a day, and probably had no influence on weight status because assessing diet in this way might not be a good measurement of quality or quantity, Fernandez said. A better way to look at diet quality might be through an evaluation of the whole diet.

In conclusion, the study suggests that workplace wellness programs should not only offer ideas on how to be healthy, but should examine the organizational structure and provide ways to minimize a stressful environment for everyone.

Posted March 22, 2010; 10:00 a.m.

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.  

In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.

”Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”

In results published online March 18 by the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, the researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute reported on two experiments investigating the link between the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and obesity. 

The first study showed that male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

The second experiment — the first long-term study of the effects of high-fructose corn syrup consumption on obesity in lab animals — monitored weight gain, body fat and triglyceride levels in rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup over a period of six months. Compared to animals eating only rat chow, rats on a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly. Male rats in particular ballooned in size: Animals with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained 48 percent more weight than those eating a normal diet. In humans, this would be equivalent to a 200-pound man gaining 96 pounds.

”These rats aren’t just getting fat; they’re demonstrating characteristics of obesity, including substantial increases in abdominal fat and circulating triglycerides,” said Princeton graduate student Miriam Bocarsly. “In humans, these same characteristics are known risk factors for high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, cancer and diabetes.” In addition to Hoebel and Bocarsly, the research team included Princeton undergraduate Elyse Powell and visiting research associate Nicole Avena, who was affiliated with Rockefeller University during the study and is now on the faculty at the University of Florida. The Princeton researchers note that they do not know yet why high-fructose corn syrup fed to rats in their study generated more triglycerides, and more body fat that resulted in obesity.

High-fructose corn syrup and sucrose are both compounds that contain the simple sugars fructose and glucose, but there at least two clear differences between them. First, sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars — it is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose — but the typical high-fructose corn syrup used in this study features a slightly imbalanced ratio, containing 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of the sweetener. Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized. 

This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles. 

In the 40 years since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the U.S. have skyrocketed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1970, around 15 percent of the U.S. population met the definition for obesity; today, roughly one-third of the American adults are considered obese, the CDC reported. High-fructose corn syrup is found in a wide range of foods and beverages, including fruit juice, soda, cereal, bread, yogurt, ketchup and mayonnaise. On average, Americans consume 60 pounds of the sweetener per person every year. 

”Our findings lend support to the theory that the excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic,” Avena said. 

The new research complements previous work led by Hoebel and Avena demonstrating that sucrose can be addictive, having effects on the brain similar to some drugs of abuse.  

In the future, the team intends to explore how the animals respond to the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in conjunction with a high-fat diet — the equivalent of a typical fast-food meal containing a hamburger, fries and soda — and whether excessive high-fructose corn syrup consumption contributes to the diseases associated with obesity. Another step will be to study how fructose affects brain function in the control of appetite.

With everything else in the U.S. becoming super sized, it was interesting to notice that the portions in the painting of the Last Supper have become super sized as well. Obesity experts argue that this change over time correlates with the increase in size of our own meals. A Cornell University team studied 52 of the most famous biblical paintings of The Last Supper to identify the size of the meals. Professor Brian Wansink, who, with his brother Craig, led the research project, which was published in the International Journal of Obesity. Craig Wansink, who is a professor of religious studies, says the changes in portion sizes is probably a reflection of culture rather than theology. Charlene Shoneye, an obesity dietician for the charity Weight Concern was not surprised to hear of this increase in portion size given the context of the United States currently.

BBC News

The food portions depicted in paintings of the Last Supper have grown larger – in line with our own super-sizing of meals, say obesity experts.

The Cornell University team studied 52 of the most famous paintings of the Biblical scene over the millennium and scrutinised the size of the feast.

They found the main courses, bread and plates put before Jesus and his disciples have progressively grown by up to two-thirds.

This, they say, is art imitating life.

Professor Brian Wansink, who, with his brother Craig, led the research, published in the International Journal of Obesity, said: “The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food.

“We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.”

He says the finding suggests that the phenomenon of serving bigger portions on larger plates has occurred gradually over the millennium.

His team used computer-aided design technology to scan and calculate the relative measurements of items in the paintings, regardless of their orientation.

These included works by El Greco, Leonardo Da Vinci, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Rubens.

Based on the assumption that the width of an average loaf of bread from the time should be twice that of the average disciple’s head, the researchers plotted the size of the Passover evening dishes.

Super-sized

The main meals grew 69% and plate size 66% between the oldest (carried out in 1000AD) and most recent (1700s) paintings. Bread size grew by about 23%.

The sharpest increases were seen in paintings completed after 1500 and up to 1900AD.

Craig Wansink, who is a professor of religious studies, says the changes in portion sizes is probably a reflection of culture rather than theology.

“There is no religious reason why the meals got bigger. It may be that meals really did grow, or that people just became more interested in food.”

Charlene Shoneye, an obesity dietician for the charity Weight Concern, said: “I’m really not surprised by these findings because the size of our plates and food portions has increased.

“Twenty years ago, for example, most crisps used to come in packs that were 20g. Now they are 30g, 50g or even 60g, and we are still eating the whole pack.

“This super-sizing has changed our perception of normal.”

But she said it was not too late to reverse the trend and that individuals, society and the food industry should look to smaller portions.

“Part of the problem is the type of food that has increased in size. Portions of fruit, veg and salad have not grown. They should make up about a third of your plate, with the remaining two-thirds left for protein and starchy foods.”