It's kinda amazing that Wansink has so much reach when his work has been the subject of an upsetting amount of retractions: <a href="https://retractionwatch.com/2017/12/28/another-retraction-appear-cornell-food-scientist-brian-wansink/" rel="nofollow">https://retractionwatch.com/2017/12/28/another-retraction-ap...</a>
> his famous “Bottomless Bowls” study concluded that people will eat soup indefinitely if their supply is constantly replenished.<p>Huh? That's not what the study concluded.<p><i>Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup […] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls.</i><p>Source: <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/oby.2005.12" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/oby.2005.12</a>
Tl;dr<p>1. Dishes with the same name are conflated despite being completely different.<p>2. Many dishes don't have a serving size they simply yield things like "1 cake".<p>3. The researcher choose a particularly small sample size (18 out of ~4500)<p>As a cooking enthusiast I find it frustrating that a researcher forces a narrative that home cooked meals are the problem when the reality is that all the fast an processed foods we have today are much more likely the culprit of obesity. We need to be encouraging people to cook for themselves with fresh ingredients and not publishing dubious studies that suggest to do the opposite.
<a href="https://nutritionfacts.org" rel="nofollow">https://nutritionfacts.org</a> has some of the most understandable analyses of published food and nutrition research. Really well done. I use just by searching an ingredient or topic of interest and see whether he's covered it. Then compare with other sources, of course.<p>He'll often point out the conflicts of interest behind the funding of various studies as well as analyzing them on their face.
> (When my parents’ ragged copy of the 1964 edition succumbed to water damage a few years ago, my mother delivered the news as if a relative had died.)<p>I'm willing to bet my life that the author has taken liberties with this "delivered the news as if a relative had died" part. I bet if there still exist actual record (say an email) of the delivery that it would be something he wouldn't want us to see. It's a small lie, sure, but it's so unpleasant. In an article whose supposed topic is honesty no less.