Are You Cooking at Home but Still Packing on the Pounds? Blame Betty Crocker

If you think cooking meals at home instead of going out to restaurants helps you trim calories from your diet, you may have to think again. A new study of several popular cookbooks finds that for many decades, cookbook authors have been gradually adding calories and increasing serving sizes for their recipes.

Your favorite recipe that used to yield 30 chocolate brownies? Now it makes just 15 servings. Gradually, over the past 70 years, the number of calories per serving in a variety of cookbooks has bulked up nearly 40 percent, for an average increase of about 77 calories per serving, researchers found.

In a study conducted by Cornell University and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers concluded that too much attention has been paid to scaling back increasing portions and calorie counts in restaurant meals and pre-packaged foods and not enough focus on limiting the same problems in home-cooked meals.

Instead of blaming Chili’s or Claim Jumper for serving up jumbo plates packed with calories, maybe we should be pointing the finger of blame at Betty Crocker.

‘Joy of Cooking,’ Other Books Examined

Researchers based their findings on recipes pulled from several cookbooks, including “Joy of Cooking,” an American classic which was first published in the 1930s and is in millions of kitchens. Over the decades, the cookbook has been updated with new editions, including in 2006.

Using seven of the editions of the book, researchers pulled 18 recipes and found that 17 of them had increased the calories per serving by increasing calories an average of 567 calories or by boosting serving sizes.

For example, the book’s recipe for chicken gumbo, which made 14 servings at 228 calories each in 1936, only yielded 10 servings at 576 calories each in 2006. However, the book’s chili con carne recipe had not increased in calories over the years, researchers said.

Is Home Cooking Worse Than Restaurant Food?

The calorie increases in “Joy of Cooking” have happened gradually over many years, with portion sizes increasing in the 1940s, the 1960s, and by the largest amount ever in 2006, the study found. By comparison, the researchers said restaurants did not start boosting calories or increasing serving sizes until the late 1970s.

A 2002 study by a New York University nutritionist found similar increases in “Joy of Cooking” calories. That research found that the book’s brownie recipe had not changed over the years until 2007, when the number of brownies yielded was cut from 30 to 15, doubling the serving sizes and greatly increasing the number of calories per serving. Also, a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that for decades had yielded 100 cookies made only 60 cookies by the 1980s, without changing any of the ingredient measurements, the study found.

Calorie Counting Can Add Up Fast

Even a seemingly small increase in the number of calories in a recipe can add weight quickly. The 40 percent increase noted by the Cornell research team is shocking, since a calorie increase of just 10 percent can affect weight, researchers said.

Also, the findings of more calories per serving are troubling because diet experts generally agree that most people eat two or three times more food per serving than the recommended serving size. That means the problem of boosting calories per serving or increasing serving sizes may be even larger than believed.

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