A study look­ing at recipes in ‘clas­sic’ recipe books such as The Joy of Cook­ing has found an aver­age 40% increase in calo­ries per serv­ing over the last 70 years—about an extra 77 calo­ries—due, in part, to a vast increase in por­tion sizes.

Lisa Young, an adjunct nutri­tion pro­fes­sor at New York Uni­ver­sity, had sim­i­lar find­ings in a 2002 study that com­pared the book’s brownie recipe from the 1960s and ‘70s edi­tions to the recipe from the 1997 edition.

“Same recipe. Same pan. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it yielded 30 brown­ies,” she says. “In the 1997 edi­tion, it yielded 15.”

Another study look­ing at the nutri­tional con­tent of mod­ern food finds that super­mar­ket veg­eta­bles now con­tain 5–40% less nutri­ents than they did 50 years ago. Time looks at three pos­si­bil­i­ties for these findings:

  • Inac­cu­rate test data
  • The ‘dilu­tion effect’
  • The ‘indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion’ of agriculture

(via Life­hacker, @HackerNewsYC)

(Apolo­gies for RSS prob­lems with this post.)