Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
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By: Brian Wansink
Format: Paperback
From: Bantam
Pub. Date: July 2007
From: Bantam
Pub. Date: July 2007
Product Details:
Catalog: Book
Release Date: 2007-08-28
Media: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 304
Ean: 9780553384482
Isbn: 0553384481
Catalog: Book
Release Date: 2007-08-28
Media: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 304
Ean: 9780553384482
Isbn: 0553384481
ABOUT THE BOOK
EDITORIAL REVIEW
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
• 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
USER REVIEWS
"I bought this book, along with The Rules of "Normal" Eating: A Commonsense Approach for Dieters, Overeaters, Undereaters, Emotional Eaters, and Everyone in Between!, about two years ago. When I went for my last physical, I discovered that I had lost 28 pounds over the course of those two years. I have not been "on a diet," or denying myself things I really wanted to eat.
I credit Mindless Eating with helping me reevaluate how I choose what to eat, and how I present it to myself (portion sizes, etc)... I credit The Rules of "Normal" Eating with helping me tune into my body's needs.
It may be that I was just ready to eat more sensibly, but these two books will put you on the path if you're able to really hear what the authors are saying: don't "diet," make sure you don't feel deprived, make sure you're not eating for any reason other than hunger or active pleasure, and don't make any changes in your diet or exercise plan if you're thinking of them as temporary fixes."
~ Written on 2008-08-21
I credit Mindless Eating with helping me reevaluate how I choose what to eat, and how I present it to myself (portion sizes, etc)... I credit The Rules of "Normal" Eating with helping me tune into my body's needs.
It may be that I was just ready to eat more sensibly, but these two books will put you on the path if you're able to really hear what the authors are saying: don't "diet," make sure you don't feel deprived, make sure you're not eating for any reason other than hunger or active pleasure, and don't make any changes in your diet or exercise plan if you're thinking of them as temporary fixes."
~ Written on 2008-08-21
"This opened my eyes to the way our food suppliers process and package food to get into our stomachs. I hope to apply some of the psychology I learned from this book into my food buying habits. I'd also like to pass this on to my children so they can be informed and sensible comsumers."
~ Written on 2008-08-18
~ Written on 2008-08-18
"We eat for a variety of reasons other than hunger, and many of them are fattening.
If you're trying to lose weight, you will be encouraged to learn that it is easier and therefore much more effective to change your environment than your mind. Wansink details experiments that illustrate the environmental cues that unobtrusively influence how much we eat.
This information is far more valuable than calories and portions and carb/protein ratios."
~ Written on 2008-07-31
If you're trying to lose weight, you will be encouraged to learn that it is easier and therefore much more effective to change your environment than your mind. Wansink details experiments that illustrate the environmental cues that unobtrusively influence how much we eat.
This information is far more valuable than calories and portions and carb/protein ratios."
~ Written on 2008-07-31
"Fun reading. I hope it helps me control my snacking. The concepts are not new but are well explained and substantiated."
~ Written on 2008-07-18
~ Written on 2008-07-18
"How can air in food make you more satisfied - make you eat less? How can it curb a tendency to be fat, or reverse a trend?
Can it? Turns out - yes.
Feed a hungry college student a half glass full of smoothie and they will eat 20% more at lunch ½ later than the college student who drinks the SAME smoothie only whipped until it swells to a full glass with air. Not only that, but the ones that eat the airy smoothie don't make it up at their next meal.
My brother, John, and my food guru, Dick, have both recommended Mindless Eating and Volumetrics to you and me. I finally read them. Actually, John recommends listening to Mindless Eating as a book on tape, so that's what I did. I recommend it.
Listen to get the fun of it and the flavor of it. Then get the book to read the summaries of what to do.
Both titles don't really work to tell you their messages. The subtitle of Volumetrics is great - Feel Full On Fewer Calories. I'd rewrite that to read - Feel Satisfied on Fewer Calories.
It's not my job to re-title these excellent books. Mindless Eating deals with how our brains are tricked to eat more than we want by other visual cues and often by genuine optical illusions.
You could summarize Volumetrics - We don't eat calories, we eat size, volume. We are stratified by greater volume and not necessarily by greater calories. Satisfied means you eat less, means you lose fat and still feel, well, satisfied.
These are not deprivation diet books. DEPRIVATION DIETS DON'T WORK. And need I say, not fun.
The two cheapest ingredients in food are water and air. Adding air or water is the simplest way to feel more satisfied with no additional calories. You read about air in the smoothie above. Soup is food with water added. Raisins are grapes with water removed.
Let's see what that does for you...
Raisins
Which is more satisfying. ¼ cup of raisins or nearly 2 cups of grapes (50 ml or 500 ml). The metric numbers makes the size difference even more startling. Exact same number of calories. Exact same food. One has water; one doesn't.
Which would you choose if you wanted to feel most satisfied?
Yep, me too.
Soup is the Free Lunch of Satisfaction
I live on good soup, not words. - Molière
Even though soup is mostly water, you and your body perceive it as food. This is very counter intuitive to me.
Proof? Give people a 270 calorie chicken-rice casserole and a glass of water as a first course to a luncheon.
Give another group the same casserole with the water added to it to make it a soup. Check both groups to see how much they ate for the rest of lunch.
The soup people ate 100 calories less of the lunch that followed and didn't make up the loss at dinner. Cool, yes! Soup created more satiety, satisfaction. Other experiments showed that chunky soup creates more satisfaction than strained soup. And hot and cold soups both create the same benefits.
You can read the physiology in the books if you're interested. But this seems like magic to me.
Bag the Peanut Butter
I over eat peanut butter; it is one of the highest density foods you can find. If I eat volume, then you have to eat a mountain of calories to get a decent volume.
If I lived alone, I would just not bring it into the house. Obviously you can use this useful tip for all your trigger foods. Since I live with the Mysterious Madame Ling, who likes peanut butter on apples, I simply put the peanut butter in a brown paper bag.
Not only is this -- Out of sight, out of mind -- it puts inconvenience into the circuit making it harder to mindlessly eat.
Note: You may be and I am on a seafood diet, I eat everything I see. Out of sight, out of mind.
OK, One Optical Illusion
People perceive tall as more than short.
Remember the optical illusion from childhood of the upside down T. They ask which is longer - the horizontal part or the vertical section.
People say the vertical is up to 20% taller when they are in fact the same length. (The illusion is so strong for me, that I got out a ruler and tested it.)
Tall thin glasses will have you drinking less wine, juice, or Coke. And again, you will feel satisfied. Remove the short squat glasses from your life, unless you want to increase your consumption of water, then the idea works in your favor. I drink water out of a Bavarian beer mug.
Action
If you have people in your family who need to monitor fat gain, get the books, read them, and then apply the tricks.
Eat well,
William
"
~ Written on 2008-06-28
Can it? Turns out - yes.
Feed a hungry college student a half glass full of smoothie and they will eat 20% more at lunch ½ later than the college student who drinks the SAME smoothie only whipped until it swells to a full glass with air. Not only that, but the ones that eat the airy smoothie don't make it up at their next meal.
My brother, John, and my food guru, Dick, have both recommended Mindless Eating and Volumetrics to you and me. I finally read them. Actually, John recommends listening to Mindless Eating as a book on tape, so that's what I did. I recommend it.
Listen to get the fun of it and the flavor of it. Then get the book to read the summaries of what to do.
Both titles don't really work to tell you their messages. The subtitle of Volumetrics is great - Feel Full On Fewer Calories. I'd rewrite that to read - Feel Satisfied on Fewer Calories.
It's not my job to re-title these excellent books. Mindless Eating deals with how our brains are tricked to eat more than we want by other visual cues and often by genuine optical illusions.
You could summarize Volumetrics - We don't eat calories, we eat size, volume. We are stratified by greater volume and not necessarily by greater calories. Satisfied means you eat less, means you lose fat and still feel, well, satisfied.
These are not deprivation diet books. DEPRIVATION DIETS DON'T WORK. And need I say, not fun.
The two cheapest ingredients in food are water and air. Adding air or water is the simplest way to feel more satisfied with no additional calories. You read about air in the smoothie above. Soup is food with water added. Raisins are grapes with water removed.
Let's see what that does for you...
Raisins
Which is more satisfying. ¼ cup of raisins or nearly 2 cups of grapes (50 ml or 500 ml). The metric numbers makes the size difference even more startling. Exact same number of calories. Exact same food. One has water; one doesn't.
Which would you choose if you wanted to feel most satisfied?
Yep, me too.
Soup is the Free Lunch of Satisfaction
I live on good soup, not words. - Molière
Even though soup is mostly water, you and your body perceive it as food. This is very counter intuitive to me.
Proof? Give people a 270 calorie chicken-rice casserole and a glass of water as a first course to a luncheon.
Give another group the same casserole with the water added to it to make it a soup. Check both groups to see how much they ate for the rest of lunch.
The soup people ate 100 calories less of the lunch that followed and didn't make up the loss at dinner. Cool, yes! Soup created more satiety, satisfaction. Other experiments showed that chunky soup creates more satisfaction than strained soup. And hot and cold soups both create the same benefits.
You can read the physiology in the books if you're interested. But this seems like magic to me.
Bag the Peanut Butter
I over eat peanut butter; it is one of the highest density foods you can find. If I eat volume, then you have to eat a mountain of calories to get a decent volume.
If I lived alone, I would just not bring it into the house. Obviously you can use this useful tip for all your trigger foods. Since I live with the Mysterious Madame Ling, who likes peanut butter on apples, I simply put the peanut butter in a brown paper bag.
Not only is this -- Out of sight, out of mind -- it puts inconvenience into the circuit making it harder to mindlessly eat.
Note: You may be and I am on a seafood diet, I eat everything I see. Out of sight, out of mind.
OK, One Optical Illusion
People perceive tall as more than short.
Remember the optical illusion from childhood of the upside down T. They ask which is longer - the horizontal part or the vertical section.
People say the vertical is up to 20% taller when they are in fact the same length. (The illusion is so strong for me, that I got out a ruler and tested it.)
Tall thin glasses will have you drinking less wine, juice, or Coke. And again, you will feel satisfied. Remove the short squat glasses from your life, unless you want to increase your consumption of water, then the idea works in your favor. I drink water out of a Bavarian beer mug.
Action
If you have people in your family who need to monitor fat gain, get the books, read them, and then apply the tricks.
Eat well,
William
"
~ Written on 2008-06-28