Last Supper Depictions Track Super-Sizing's Rise

(March 23) -- The Last Supper of Jesus Christ has to be one of the most analyzed meals in history, but surely no one has looked at it like this before. Two academic brothers -- one an expert on obesity, the other a religion professor -- studied 52 different depictions of the famous gathering stretching back 1,000 years, looking for trends in the size of the plates and the portions heaped upon them.

The new research, described in the current issue of the International Journal of Obesity, shows that the loaves of bread in the scenes have gotten 23 percent larger over time, while plate size has jumped 66 percent. Entrees? They have grown by a startling 69 percent. "You just sort of see more food on the table," one of the brothers, religious studies professor Craig Wansink of Virginia Wesleyan College, tells AOL News.

Over the past millennium, there have been major increases in food production, availability and abundance, observes Brian Wansink, who is an economist at Cornell University and the author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think." Yet there is a downside to abundance. Obesity is on the rise, too, and has been linked to increased portions and plate sizes. After flipping through the book "The Last Supper," a collection of paintings of the famous meal, the brothers realized they had found a way to see whether this trend stretched back further than the era of super-sized fast food.

Some of the paintings couldn't be used, either because the food or plate sizes weren't clear, or because the exact date of the rendition is unknown. The Wansinks ended up scanning 52 reprints of the paintings and measuring the size of the entrees, bread and plates in each relative to the disciples' heads. Then they searched for changes over time. "We were trying to see if there was any kind of correlation," Craig Wansink says. "When the data fell out, we did see that it was a clear upward slope."