I agree, with a caveat. There’s overeating in terms of food volume (bigger portions, eating past fullness, however you’d like to look at it), and there’s “eating the same volume as you did before, except much of the food is more calorically dense.”
My Betty Crocker cookbook from 1969 (where I get most of my dessert recipes) has a brownie recipe that calls for 2 cups sugar, 4 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter; it’s meant to bake in a 13x9 pan and yield 32 brownies.
The brownie recipe on Betty Crocker’s website (that is, “today’s brownie recipe”) calls for 1 3⁄4 cups sugar, 5 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter, but is meant to bake in a 9x9 pan and yield 16 brownies.
At 201 grams of sugar per cup, you get 22 grams of sugar per brownie in today’s recipe vs. 12.5 grams of sugar per brownie in the 1969 recipe.
Today’s brownie recipe yields brownies that are 5 square inches and the 1969 recipe yields brownies that are 3.65 square inches, but even if you cut today’s brownies to the size of yesterday’s brownies you’d still get 16 grams of sugar per brownie.
Yes, excellent point. Guyenet claims we’re overeating calories. He doesn’t claim we’re necessarily overeating raw mass, and in fact talks about caloric density in the book a few times.
I agree, with a caveat. There’s overeating in terms of food volume (bigger portions, eating past fullness, however you’d like to look at it), and there’s “eating the same volume as you did before, except much of the food is more calorically dense.”
As I commented on the Hyperpalatable Food Hypothesis post, you can actually compare recipes from then and now to see what’s going on:
At 201 grams of sugar per cup, you get 22 grams of sugar per brownie in today’s recipe vs. 12.5 grams of sugar per brownie in the 1969 recipe.
Today’s brownie recipe yields brownies that are 5 square inches and the 1969 recipe yields brownies that are 3.65 square inches, but even if you cut today’s brownies to the size of yesterday’s brownies you’d still get 16 grams of sugar per brownie.
Yes, excellent point. Guyenet claims we’re overeating calories. He doesn’t claim we’re necessarily overeating raw mass, and in fact talks about caloric density in the book a few times.