Home cooking is healthy cooking, right? Not necessarily; a study shows that recipes have grown over time along with our waistlines. Researchers found that over the past seven decades, there has been a 35 percent increase in calories per serving in recipes from the quintessentially American cookbook Joy of Cooking, which has been updated roughly every 10 years since it was first commercially published in 1936. The bump in calories came mostly from the use of higher-calorie ingredients, but larger serving sizes also contributed. What’s the alternative? Try to use cookbooks that provide nutritional information (Joy of Cooking has a detailed table of per-serving data but doesn’t do the nutritional math for you on every recipe), and never assume that any recipe is a recipe for health.
Source: Annals of Internal Medicine, Feb. 17, 2009