The professor of pigging out
Brian Wansink, of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, dishes about food self-delusion, holiday dieting, and how it might be the size of your plate -- not pie -- that's responsible for your paunch.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Read more: Psychology, Dieting, Fat, Obesity, Eating, Katharine Mieszkowski, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel
Nov. 28, 2006 | Just call him Dr. Gorge.
Brian Wansink, professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University, is a scholar of the 10-course holiday feast and the office candy bowl. In the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, which he directs, students in psychology, marketing and nutrition conduct experiments to uncover the influences behind our overindulgences. Wansink and his disciples have engineered bottomless soup bowls, which secretly refill, to gauge how much test subjects eat with their eyes vs. their stomachs. They've thrown Super Bowl parties solely for the purpose of measuring how much Chex Mix revelers toss back during the big game. And they've sought answers to such eternal questions as: If 10 different types of Christmas cookies grace the holiday buffet, will people eat more than if there were only five?
In his new book, "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think," Wansink argues that by becoming aware of the myriad cues that instruct us to eat more, we can reverse their influences -- painlessly eating less, without depriving ourselves of the foods we love. He contends that it's not just what we eat that makes many Americans overload on calories, but how we buy and serve food that is to blame for our bulging waistlines. And for everyone hoping to enjoy this year's holiday festivities without piling on pounds they'll regret come Jan. 1, Wansink has this message: Spend less time fretting over the calories in a teaspoon of gravy, and more considering the size of the spoon dishing it out, or the gravy boat it comes to the table in.
Salon called Wansink at his office in Ithaca, N.Y., to discuss yo-yo dieting, the psychology behind "comfort food" and some of the surprising signals that can influence our stomachs.
Whether dining at McDonald's, Subway or the French Laundry, you find that people routinely underestimate how many calories they've eaten. By how much?
In general, the average person of average weight will underestimate their caloric intake by 20 percent. We're wishful thinkers. And we more grossly underestimate when the meals are really, really huge, or when we think that they're really, really healthy.
When we have a low-calorie meal, we typically compensate by eating more of something else. There's a health halo that's associated with foods that we think are good for us, which lends a nice glow to anything at a restaurant that we believe is a healthy, fresh restaurant. For instance, we found that Subway diners believe that they ate healthily, even if they ordered mayonnaise on their sandwich, ordered it with cheese, and got a bag of chips, or some cookies.
What other factors make us eat more irrespective of how food actually tastes?
Most people believe we overeat because we're really hungry or the food tastes really good. But we show in study after study that that is not that case.
If you go to a movie theater, everything says, eat, even if you're not hungry, and even if the food tastes bad. The size of the bucket says "eat more." The noise of the people eating around you says "eat more," the distraction of the movie says "eat more," and the person you're sitting with, if they're still eating, tells you to "eat more."
In one experiment, even when we gave people really stale popcorn, even though they'd just eaten, and even though it was terrible, they still ended up eating it. Our studies found that people given a large bucket ate 51 percent more calories than those who were given a medium bucket.
We eat with our eyes, not with our stomach. One experiment we've done in this realm is with a refillable soup bowl. We found that people eating from the refillable bowl ate 73 percent more soup.
What is a refillable soup bowl?
It's a bowl we devised that would go down about halfway, and then slowly start refilling itself. But it would refill itself so imperceptibly that no one would notice that it was happening.
And you found that people continue to eat based on what's in the bowl?
Exactly; you're using a visual cue. You think: "There's still soup in my bowl, so I still need to keep eating. I haven't eaten half a bowl yet."
Everyone's heard about the concept of "super-sizing" in fast-food restaurants, but where else do you see that phenomenon?
Plates have gotten a lot bigger. Look at the plates in antique stores, from the '40s and '50s. An antique store owner told me customers would really like the pattern on a dinner plate from the '40s, and they'd say: "I like these salad plates. Do you have any dinner plates?" One time, when he told a woman, "No, those are dinner plates," she went back and found a platter, and said, "Do you have any more of these platters that I could use as dinner plates?"
How does serving food on a larger plate encourage someone to eat more?
We find that people eat 92 percent of all the food that they serve themselves. You're likely to eat, if not all of it, most of it. So anything that causes you to take more than you otherwise would is going to cause you to eat more. Six ounces of pasta on an 8-inch plate looks like a pretty good portion. But that same 6 ounces of pasta on a 12-inch plate would look like barely an appetizer.
Does the way food is described influence our impressions of how it tastes?
We are very suggestible when it comes to taste. If someone you're eating with says: "Oh, man! This tastes really great," and then they give you a bite of their food, it's very seldom you don't believe it tastes great, too.
The same thing happens with names. Anytime someone mentions a name that's evocative, it will make you like the food more. If someone tells you you're going to have "double-chocolate Belgian black forest cake," you're going to like that, and think it tastes a whole lot better than if they just said: "Want a piece of chocolate cake?"
Practically everyone thinks that they're too smart to fall for these sorts of things, yet you argue that we all do anyway.
That's why these [influences] have such power. Almost all of us think we know what we like. We believe we're too smart to be tricked by something so silly, and that's where we really, really, really get tripped up. Because we say: "Hey, come on. Look. I'm a smart guy and no little trick is going to throw me off balance." That's the real power of these habits, and that's what makes them so ubiquitous. We deny that they ever happened to us.
