4) researcher is a serial p-hacker who even boasted about the practice
5) reason given for the small sample (most recipes had changed) was a lie and sample appears to have been cherry-picked
It wasn't a sample, it was supposedly (but very much not, in fact) the entire universe, that is, the set of recipes that were present across the entire time period from the first to the most recent edition, and thus could be compared across time.
> Wansink also insisted on only comparing recipes that bore identical names in different “Joy” editions, regardless of the accompanying recipes, which sometimes led him to compare two entirely different dishes. He liked to point to gumbo as one of the most egregious calorie gainers, but the recipe from 1936, a clear soup of chicken and sliced vegetables simmered in water, has almost nothing in common with the sausage-studded, roux-thickened chicken variety featured in the 2006 book. “It’s like comparing a Chateaubriand to a whole roast steer,” Heathers said, “and saying they’re both roast beef.”
Presumably this would also exclude many recipes whose names were changed but are basically the same.
It really doesn't matter that your potatoes have been sitting in the fridge for two weeks, or that your steak's been in the freezer for a month, or that heaven forbid, your onions did not magically arrive from a farmer's market to your plate. The problem is that you fried your potatoes in half a cup of butter, and that you're eating steak.
More seriously: correlation is not the same as causation, but one of the obvious correlated changes is the increase in consumption of sugary beverages: soft-drinks, fruit juices &c.
We ate big meals, but we didn't eat anything else. When I see families now, they stock up with super mega sized snack food at Costco and cram it in their minivan (the 2 reasons for having a minivan being to drive soccer teams around and to take your super mega sized snack food home </snark>) When I was a kid, people didn't buy stuff at that scale. Homes were smaller too, as were refrigerators. You just couldn't do that kind of thing easily.
Of course, my excuse for getting fat these days is because I live in Japan and there is nowhere in Japan that isn't walking distance from a convenience store... That and my wife believes that beer has no calories -- a misunderstanding that I'm loathe to correct.
I don't know about your parents, but when I look at what was done for free time when my grandparents(born ~1930s) and my parents (born in the 1950s) did in their free time vs what my friends and I did I can't help but see a significant difference in the time spent active. I'm not just talking about going out to ride a bike/play basketball with my friends, but later in life. When my grandfather went to work, school, and even to a bar he always walked and my father had a similar relationship with mobility during his early to teen years. Of course that changed when they both were old enough to own a car, but for both of them that wasn't until they're late teens.
Combine that with the only entertainment being other places or outside you have a populace who expends significantly more calories every day than my generation (Millenial).
As time progresses I think you might see parents from the earlier generations feeding their kids at the level they were fed as kids not recognizing that little Billy watches youtube for 3 hours after finishing his homework instead of going and playing basketball with Tuk-Tuk leading to a daily calorie surplus. Over time a daily intake of +200 calories can easily add up to a significant amount of weight.
I don't have any data to support this other than my anecdotal story and how I approached weight loss (by decreasing intake and increasing passive/everyday calory burn rate), but I think it'd be a cool thing to see studied.
Frankly, I don't think I agree with this, because someone who's cooking with fresh ingredients gets to see, for instance, that they are adding a boggling amount of sugar to their food.
Who actually adds a mind-boggling amount of sugar to their food when they cook from basic ingredients? Everyone I know overdoes fats, but sugar?
The sugar contents of some of the staples - bread, sauces, etc. - can be shockingly high. A tablespoon of ketchup has more sugar than a chocolate chip cookie.
Ketchup isn't really any less fresh than the butter/oil.
Ketchup has about 1/3 the calories of a chocolate chip cookie. What does it matter that it has the same amount of sugar?
http://www.kraftrecipes.com/products/kraft-16-fo-dressing-li...
Or even if you are making your own, a surprising number have sugar or honey as ingredients.
I was agreeing with your point.
As to your second paragraph, well, here is my point illustrated. Added sugars are probably our biggest problem. Even when it comes to lipids, I don't think most people cooking at home are making Cheesecake Factory-style meals. But my understanding of the latest research is that trying to remove fats from your diet is no longer necessarily recommended.
It's not the only way (Honestly, I prefer duck/goose fat if I'm feeling fancy, beef if not), but it's a perfectly acceptable way of making crispy delicious hash browns.
Probably with cheese sauce for good measure...
I have never used a full stick of butter in the making of either of these. For hash I use as little as I need to lubricate the potatoes. For mashed I use about 1 tablespoon per 2.5 pounds of potatoes. Since I have never made 20 pounds at once, I have never used a full stick.
1. Dishes with the same name are conflated despite being completely different.
2. Many dishes don't have a serving size they simply yield things like "1 cake".
3. The researcher choose a particularly small sample size (18 out of ~4500)
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.