|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2007 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
Mindless
Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Attention I didn’t know
that there were food psychologists until I read Brian Wansink’s
new book, Mindless
Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Wansink
claims that we make about 200 food related decisions every day, and most of
them involve receiving outside influences that we fail to notice. By paying
attention to one or two of these influences, some eating habits can be
revised to improve health. Given how many diet books are sold, and how many
readers hate dieting but do it anyway, the research that Wansink
presents here allows readers to take a different approach to understanding
nutrition and the process of eating. Here’s an excerpt, from the end of
Chapter 7, “In the Mood for Comfort Food,” pp. 156-161: Do
You Save the Best for Last? At
dinnertime do you eat your favorite foods first or do you tend to save the
best for last? The world is divided in half on this issue. We discovered why,
but quite accidentally. The story
started when we teamed up with Peter Todd and other behavioral scientists
from the Max Planck Institutes in Our
hypothesis was that when we eat a number of foods in a row our overall
evaluation of them will be biased by either the first food or the last.
Psychologists refer to this as the power of primacy and recency.
That is, our judgment of a meal is biased by our first impression or our
last impression. If the middle courses, like the entrée or side dishes, fall
short, that should matter less. If true,
this would also be useful knowledge for time-stressed chefs or for the
weekend cook who has invited six neighbors over for dinner. If you impress
them with your appetizer or dessert, you don’t have to worry so much about
the food in the middle. To test
this theory, we decided to start with convenient, inexpensive snacks. If it
didn’t work with snacks, it probably wouldn’t work with entrées and
appetizers. To find a wide range of snacks that Americans were likely to find
either good or bad, we scoured We arranged
12 huge bowls of these snacks and invited 183 hungry students in for a
late-afternoon “snack buffet.” First we asked them to rank-order all 12
snacks from what they thought would be their favorite down to their least favorite.
Then we dished up their favorite, their least favorite, and one toward the
middle (their sixth favorite). We told them they could have as many snacks as
they wanted, but before they could have additional snacks, they had to eat
these three. This is when the weeping and the gnashing of teeth began. Almost
everyone reluctantly agreed to continue with the study and to eat the three
snacks. After they finished, we asked them to rate their overall experience
(on a 1—100 point scale), along with some questions about their background
and their childhood. We expected that people who ate their least favorite
choice first or last would like the experience less than those who ate it in
the middle. This did
not happen. Their ratings appeared almost random. There was nothing
interesting—no patterns, no insights. It was a waste of $1,100 of snack food
and about 175 of hours of planning,
shopping, feeding, cleaning up, and data analysis. This was
nothing new; more than half our studies don’t come out as gracefully as we
hypothesize.12 We’re used to going back to the drawing board,
finding what went wrong, and running the study a different way. This time,
however, our return to the drawing board turned up something we had
overlooked: almost nobody ate either their favorite food or their least favorite
food in the middle. They seemed to use one of two “eating strategies.” They
either “saved the best for last” or “ate the best one first.” When we
looked again at the questionnaires they had completed, we discovered that
people who ate the best one first often shared one of two characteristics:
they either grew up as a youngest child or came from large families. The
people most likely to save the best for last, on the other hand, had grown up
as an only child or as the oldest. They could afford to save their favorite
foods as a reward, knowing it would still be waiting for them at the end of
the meal. It’s different for children in big families, particularly if
they’re not the oldest. There is competition for food, even when there’s
plenty to eat. If you don’t eat your favorite foods first, you might lose out
altogether. Get it while you can. In the
end, our childhood eating habits can follow us for years. If a child becomes
conditioned to eat their favorite foods first, they might develop the
long-term eating habit of filling up on the high-calorie goodies at the
expense of the healthier salads, fruits, and vegetables. That is a recipe for
obesity. Each
February, everyone in my Lab volunteers to serve free meals in local soup
kitchens, such as the Salvation Army’s. Although every person eating there
has a different story, one thing they all have in common is that they’re
hungry. A second thing that many have in common is the order in which they
eat their foods and the order in which they get their plates refilled:
favorites first. This almost always translates into eating the high-calorie
foods first, and the salads, fruits, and vegetables last (if at all). We have
just begun our food-order project, but in combination with our soup kitchen
experiences, it’s made the people in my Lab uneasy. Once habits are formed,
like eating the more caloric food first, how easy are they to change? Let’s
say that all of the fruits and vegetables in a low-income neighborhood
suddenly become fresh and affordable— maybe even free—would that make a
difference in what people actually ate? Or would they still fill up on the highcalorie foods? If a boy
grew up not knowing when or what the next meal would be, he would be smart to
“eat the best first” any chance he got. The problem with this strategy arises
years later when food is more plentiful and he is deciding between a
pepperoni pizza or a salad. Being ingrained with
fears of food scarcity might mean the pizza disappears without the salad
being touched. Food
associations can last for a lifetime. What went on at the dinner table 30 (or
even 50) years ago affects us now.
We can mindfully override these tendencies, but they still persist when we
slip back into mindless eating. Reengineering Strategy #7: Make Comfort Foods More Comforting The
dieting strategy of saying “I’ll never eat fried chicken or ice cream again
in my life” is destined for failure. Comfort foods help make life enjoyable.
The key is learning how to have your cake and eat it too. ·
Don’t deprive
yourself. One
reason many diets fail before they even really gain momentum is that they
deprive us of the food and lifestyle we enjoy. They also require us to forgo
our typical way of life and to focus on calories and on resisting generations
of evolution and billions of dollars of food marketing. The best way to begin
changing habits is to do so in a way that doesn’t make you feel deprived:
keep the comfort foods, but eat them in smaller amounts. Our studies also
show that most people have at least some comfort foods that are reasonably
healthy. Small doses take you a long way. ·
Rewire your comfort
foods. If
your comfort foods consist mainly of the four c’s—cookies,
candies, chips, and cake—all is not lost. Just like the Chinese graduate
student who developed American comfort-food favorites in her 20s, we can
rewire our comfort foods. The key is to start pairing healthier foods with
positive events. Instead of celebrating a personal victory or smothering a
defeat with the “death by chocolate” ice cream sundae, try a smaller bowl of
ice cream with fresh strawberries. It’s not a big sacrifice, and before long
it will start to inch up your “favorites” list. The research
experiments that Wansink and his team conducted at
Cornell and the Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2007 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Mindless
Eating.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
