Cornell University marketing professor Brian Wansink's goal is to uncover hidden cues that influence how much people eat. He wants to know if people grab more candy from a bowl if there are more colors (yes), and whether the subtle prompts like mood and setting that affect their eating (generally, no).
He lays out the case in his new book, Mindless Eating, Why We Eat More than We Think We Eat.
"So much of the answer lies not in counting calories, not in legislating, but in the middle range of what we can do by changing some of our own habits," Wansink said during an interview in his Food and Brand Lab on Cornell's upstate New York campus.
The lab's main room is designed to look like a kitchen, but one with tiny surveillance cameras, a two-way mirror and a food scale hidden beneath a dishrag on the counter. The idea is to provide a homey atmosphere where test subjects can eat, and an unobtrusive way for researchers to watch.
On a recent day, Wansink leaned close into the two-way mirror as postdoctoral researcher Collin Payne served Beefaroni and vegetables to a test subject — only to cough on the dish before he got to her seat.
The cough was choreographed, a ruse to force her to dish herself another serving, this time on a slightly smaller plate. Wansink wants to know if she will dole out a smaller portion on the smaller plate, which she does.
This sort of clever subterfuge is common to Wansink's experiments. Wansink once designed self-filling soup bowls that pump tomato soup up from under the table as people supped from them. He wanted to find out if people stopped eating without the visual cue of an empty bowl. Some people ate more than a quart.
Another time, when he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he told half the diners at a restaurant/lab that their complementary glass of cabernet sauvignon that night came from California, the other half were told the same wine came from the colder state of North Dakota. Not only did the North Dakota group eat less of their dinner, they headed for the exits quicker.
Same wine, same food, different cues, different results.
Wansink's larger point is that people make more than 200 food decisions a day, most of them subconsciously. He believes people trying fad diets would be better served changing little behaviors that could cut a relatively painless 100 to 200 calories a day. It can be done in part by hiding the candy or avoiding jumbo-sized packaging, which tends to encourage consumption.
Pick two or three habits a month, he advises. For instance, Wansink this month is trying not to eat a snack unless he first eats fruit, and he set a one-roll limit for meals out.
Wansink's "ingenious" study designs set him apart in the nascent field of investigating what motivates people to eat, said Andrew Geier, a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who has published eating behavior research.
"He's leading the way in trying explain eating behavior from the nose up," Geier said.
Wansink's PhD is in marketing and consumer behavior, unusual in a field full of researchers with psychology backgrounds. The 46-year-old from Iowa farm country feels his research sometimes falls between the cracks academically. But he learned years ago he could bypass academic ambivalence by sending copies of his research directly to journalists. He recalls his getting early career media hits in Woman's Day and Cooking Light magazines and thinking "This is really cool!"
"I decided to write things that would always have a takeaway for consumers," he said.
Some of his most provocative work casts doubt on the value of nutrition labels for consumers. He believes people are either too busy or distracted to read packages. Worse, labels can lull people into a false sense of security, like Subway diners feeling good about eating a low-fat sandwich, and then loading up on chips and a soda.
Eating a wrap sandwich for lunch on campus, he cannot help noticing a label on his mayonnaise packet: "As always 0g carbs."
"I love it!" he said with a laugh.
The packet doesn't mention that a single serving has 10g of fat and 90 calories.
On the Net: foodpsychology.cornell.edu and mindlesseating.org
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would