Mindless Eating

Wansink, Brian. Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. New York: Bantam, 2006. Print    

First Sentences:

Everyone -- every single one of us -- eats how much we eat largely because of what's around us.

We overeat not because of hunger but because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers. This list is almost as endless as it's invisible. Most of us are blissfully unaware of what influences how much we eat.

Description:

Books about health, diet, exercise, and routes toward an improved lifestyle always fascinate me. So of course, Brian Wansink's  Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think called out to me. As I get older, the food that attracts me changes, often not for the better. Reading that outside factors unconsciously pull me to eat certain foods and that I might counteract these factors to lose weight certainly had my interest from the first sentences.

Mindless Eating presents Wansink's fascinating experiments which reveal overwhelming evidence to destroy our cherished myth that what we eat is determined by our hunger, by the food we like, and by the mood we are in. The book instead focuses on the psychological forces at play which lure us to overeat, even by only a few calories a day. 

Wansink's dietary premise is simple. Let's say your daily nutritional requirement is 2,000 calories per day. If you try a run-of-the-mill deprivation diet and take in only 1,000 calories a day, you will definitely feel a difference: loss of energy; maybe a slowing down physically and mentally; cravings for more food. On the other hand, if you were to intake 3,000 calories on a day like Thanksgiving, you again would feel the effects of overeating: sluggishness, sleepiness, etc. Your body always knows and reacts when it is over or under fed.

But for smaller increases or decreases, the body can be completely fooled and unaware. In Mindless Eating, Wansink points out that rather than stuffing ourselves at meals, our more typical eating behavior is to add small amounts of calories, say 100 - 200, over the daily nutritional requirement of 2,000, so small an amount that we don't even realize we are taking it in. 

At the end of the year, one might think "How did I gain those 5-10 pounds? I didn't change my diet at all." Those 100 - 200 daily caloric increases add up. Wansink reasons that if a person could decrease his/her calories taken in "mindlessly," those same 10 pounds would be lost each year rather than gained. No special diets, no deprivation, simple to understand. Sounds easy, huh?

Wansink, who is Chair of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell University, runs the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. This facility features a restaurant where he can try real-life eating variables (dish size, waitstaff attitude, table shape, lighting, etc.) in a controlled environment to observe what factors affect the way people eat. 

In one of his non-lab studies, he gave people at a real movie theater a soda and medium or large size  bucket of popcorn. Unknown to them, this was very stale 5-day-old popcorn. After the show, all popcorn bags were weighed to see how much people ate. Despite the negative taste, people with the larger bags ate 173 more calories ("21 more dips into the bucket") than those with smaller portions. 

Exit surveys showed these people admitted they had eaten too much popcorn, even when one movie-goer said it tasted like "styrofoam packing peanuts." Repeated tests of this experiment confirmed that the results were unchanged by the movie shown, the city, and the hunger level of the audience: the bigger bucket people always ate significantly more inedible popcorn.

In another study, Wansink had waiters at his Cornell test restaurant give a complimentary glass of very cheap wine to diners sitting in one half of the room. This wine was introduced by the waiters and labeled as a product of a new "California" winery. Diners on the other half of the restaurant received the very same cheap wine, which was now labeled and introduced as coming from a "North Dakota" winery. 

The meal, atmosphere, waitstaff, etc. were all the same. At the end of the meal, those with the "California" wine ate 11% more food and stayed in the restaurant an additional 10 minutes compared to the North Dakota wine drinkers. 

Wansink presents human eating behavior depicted from many other experiments he designed to test factors such as size of plates, packaging, location of food (on desk vs. in drawer vs. six feet away), eating in complete darkness, renaming food, mood of the consumers, etc. Each chapter summarizes the conclusions of the studies, then proposes specific "Reengineering Strategies" to help us be aware of these nefarious influences on our eating and then offer strategies to avoid those additional mindless calories.

The writing style is simple, easy to understand, and clear in its implications. The studies are cleverly constructed and I found the test subjects actions to be remarkably similar to my own eating habits. It is fascinating to understand the subtle factors in play that encourage us to consume food, and through this awareness how we might change the way we eat.

One interesting side note. When Wansink revealed the purpose of each study to his subjects, they overwhelmingly said that, while others might have had their eating influenced by the size of the package, the name on the wine label, the plating, the menu description, etc., those factors did not come into play for them. And, of course, they had eaten exactly according to the pattern, just as did everyone else who fell prey to the psychological factors around the food. Hmmmm ...

Happy reading (and eating!).

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Taubes, Gary. Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It   

Taubes' extensive research from a huge number of studies reaches the controversial conclusion that the "eat less, exercise more" theory of weight loss does not hold true. It is what you eat, according to this controversial and compelling summary of a huge number of available data on eating, food, lifestyle, and weight.