Book Review: Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink, Part I
amy April 9th, 2007
The average person makes over 200 choices about food every day: when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, where to eat, who to eat with. Most of these decisions are mindless and are made based on habit, environmental cues, visual cues, marketing, package size, and food proximity, just to name a few factors, not necessarily because of hunger or even the taste of food.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, written by food psychologist Brian Wansink, sheds light on the hidden cues that determine how much and why people eat. Wansink is the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab which, unlike many food and brand labs, is not funded by food companies and relies on grants and gifts instead. Because of this separation, the lab has had the freedom to conduct some very interesting studies without a specific agenda.
Here are some of the lab’s more interesting studies and findings:
- Diners at an upscale restaurant were given a complimentary glass of wine, Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon, which sells for $2 a bottle. The bottles were relabeled. Half of the diners were told it was a new wine from North Dakota, and half that it was from California. Those who thought they were drinking California wine ate 11 percent more of their food and lingered for 10 minutes longer at their table on average than those who drank the “North Dakota.” The “North Dakota” wine drinkers rated the wine as bad and the food as less tasty. Wansink explains this as the halo effect; those who were poured the “California” wine expected their dining experience to be good based on their preconception of California wines, and therefore it was. They no longer thought about whether the food was actually good or not.
- 35 MBA students attended a Super Bowl party, where they were treated to a free hot wing buffet. Each table had a bowl in the center to collect the bones. The waitresses were instructed (unbeknownst to the subjects) to buss the bones from only half of the tables; at the rest of the tables, the bowls full of bones remained in sight for the entire game. The researchers carefully weighed and counted all of the leftover chicken bones eaten by each of the tables. They found that the students who did not have the visual reminder ate 7 wings on average, 2 more than those at the bone-pile tables (that’s 28% more). Wansink concludes that our stomachs can’t count and our brain’s don’t remember how much we eat. Without visual cues, it is easy to overeat.
- 60 people were treated to a free lunch of tomato soup, four at a time. At each table, two of the diners had regular bowls, and two had bowls with an undetectable hole at the bottom, through which a tube connected the bowls to larger pots of hot soup. As the diners ate from the modified bowls, they would gradually refill with more soup. Those with the bottomless bowls ate 73 percent more than those with the regular bowls, but estimated they had eaten approximately the same amount of soup and rated themselves at the same level of fullness. Some of the participants ate more than a quart of the soup! The study suggests that people tend to gauge their eating on visual cues instead of hunger cues.
- A separate smoking room in a Hardee’s restaurant was made over with tablecloths, candles, and soft music. Patrons who ate in the converted dining room were served by a waiter. They stayed for an average of 11 minutes longer, ate and drank less of their food and beverages, ordered more desserts, and rated their food as better tasting than those who ate in the regular dining room. Restaurant atmospheres are carefully designed with specific purposes in mind; to get you in and out quickly in the case of fast food restaurants, or to encourage you to linger and order additional items in the case of upscale restaurants.
Many more interesting studies are contained in Mindless Eating. You can purchase it here
Coming up in Part II: how can you take advantage of these findings to reduce the mindless margin and cut out calories without noticing?
