Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
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Recommended By
Rebecca Adler and murakamillion.
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Book Details
Written by Brian Wansink.
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($25.00)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
In this illuminating and groundbreaking new book, food psychologist Brian Wansink shows why you may not realize how much you’re eating, what you’re eating–or why you’re even eating at all.• Does food with a brand name really taste better?
• Do you hate brussels sprouts because your mother did?
• Does the size of your plate determine how hungry you feel?
• How much would you eat if your soup bowl secretly refilled itself?
• What does your favorite comfort food really say about you?
• Why do you overeat so much at healthy restaurants?
Brian Wansink is a Stanford Ph.D. and the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. He’s spent a lifetime studying what we don’t notice: the hidden cues that determine how much and why people eat. Using ingenious, fun, and sometimes downright fiendishly clever experiments like the “bottomless soup bowl,” Wansink takes us on a fascinating tour of the secret dynamics behind our dietary habits. How does packaging influence how much we eat? Which movies make us eat faster? How does music or the color of the room influence how much we eat? How can we recognize the “hidden persuaders” used by restaurants and supermarkets to get us to mindlessly eat? What are the real reasons most diets are doomed to fail? And how can we use the “mindless margin” to lose–instead of gain–ten to twenty pounds in the coming year?
Mindless Eating will change the way you look at food, and it will give you the facts you need to easily make smarter, healthier, more mindful and enjoyable choices at the dinner table, in the supermarket, in restaurants, at the office–even at a vending machine–wherever you decide to satisfy your appetite.
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Rebecca Adler thinks this book is Excellent.
I just finished "Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think" by Brian Wansink. I picked this one up because it was suggested reading at the end of "In Defense of Food." Michael Pollan actually discusses a couple of Wansink's studies in his book and that's what really got me interested in reading "Mindless Eating."
Wansink is a food psychologist (who knew this occupation even existed?!), and does tons of studies at Cornell about what we eat and why. One of my favorite studies he talks about is the bottomless soup bowl study, in which half the diners in a restaurant were given automatically refilling bowls (the bowls refilled from the bottom in such a way that diners were ignorant of the trick). People with auto-refill bowls ate 73 percent more soup than those with non-refillable bowls. The study showed that Americans base their eating behavior on outside cues - that is to say we stop eating when our bowl (plate, bag, etc.) is empty, rather than stopping when we feel full.
Wansink goes on to describe several other studies he has performed - studies that show how we react to labels, at what age we stop recognizing when we're full, what stops us from snacking throughout the day - and then he tells us how we can avoid or curb those cues to stop us from eating more than we should. He explains that diets often don't work because we're trying to make major changes, but if you just try to cut out 100 or 200 calories a day, you'll lose between 10 and 20 pounds in a year without even realizing it.
Even if you're not particularly interested in losing weight, this is an interesting book. I thought it was fascinating to learn about all of the behaviors we have unknowingly picked up in regard to food. Also, I'd love to know how Wansink comes up with all of these great ideas for studies.