How I Spent My Research Grant

photo from times online

So apparently this blog is supposed to have real health information. Like useful stuff. Were any of you going to tell me that? No matter. The silliness is behind me now. Let’s get down to important stuff, like how hotshot researchers waste spend their time.

(Imagine a disclaimer here that says I understand not all research is pointless and I realize plenty of good things have come out of scientific studies. For example, without research we wouldn’t know I’m going to die from a stroke someday.)

This is the first in a new series (or, you know, maybe just one post; we’ll see how this goes) called How I Spent My Research Grant, we take you to the lab of Brian Wansick, the genius behind Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Though, let’s be serious: If you’re Brian Wansick and as ubiquitous as Ryan Seacrest you probably have a palace, not just a workbench with a Bunsen burner somewhere in the deep recesses of Cornell’s Food Lab.

Anyhow, even if you don’t know Wansick by name, there’s an 88.764 percent chance you know his work. He’s the smartypants (I mean that) who figured out why we eat like we do—say, why we eat more when our bowls are bigger. So, I really do find his work interesting if not somewhat depressing. (What?! I eat more when the menu’s wording is all fancy? How pathetic of me.) Except for his latest study…

He and his brother, who’s a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College, compared the size of bread and dishes in 52 “Last Supper” paintings and compared them to today’s portion sizes. Their conclusion: The size of entrees has grown by 69 percent over the last 1,000 years.

Let me start by saying I don’t have a problem with the researchers assuming the Last Supper actually happened. I believe it did, so it’s not the event that bothers me.

It’s the paintings. Let’s use the most famous of all Last Supper renditions—da Vinci’s. And let’s pretend Leonardo da Vinci was kind of a genius. And let’s assume he painted the plates and food in sizes that reflected his time period, about 500 years ago. OK good. But who’s to say the other 51 paintings are as skillfully rendered? Or accurate?

I realize I risk getting smote for this, but … who’s to say da Vinci didn’t make the plates that size because it worked better in the painting? That those aren’t true to his time period? My point is this: It’s a painting. Can we really take a painting as a real representation of what serving sizes were like back then? Really?

Was that worth the time and money that went into it? Because if so, I’d like $25,ooo to study this hypothesis: Human faces today are 87 percent more symmetrical than they were in 1938. Seriously, look:

photo from world gallery

Oh, and I think we’re getting thinner, too…

photo from discovery education

What are your thoughts? Do you want to sponsor my research on facial orientation over the past 70 years? Why not?