Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think [Hardcover]

Brian Wansink (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 17, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

According to Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, the mind makes food-related decisions, more than 200 a day, and many of them without pause for actual thought. This peppy, somewhat pop-psych book argues that we don't have to change what we eat as much as how, and that by making more mindful food-related decisions we can start to eat and live better. The author's approach isn't so much a diet book as a how-to on better facilitating the interaction between the feed-me messages of our stomachs and the controls in our heads. In their particulars, the research summaries are entertaining, like an experiment that measured how people ate when their plates were literally "bottomless," but the cumulative message and even the approach feels familiar and not especially fresh. Wansink examines popular diets like the South Beach and Atkins regimes, and offers a number of his own strategies to help focus on what you eat: at a dinner party, "try to be the last person to start eating." Whether readers take time to weigh their decisions and their fruits and vegetables remains to be seen. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Anyone who's tried to follow a strict eating regimen knows how futile it sometimes seems. Nutritional science and marketing professor Wansink explores some of the psychological aspects of overeating to explain why we in fact consume more than we believe we do. He advocates weight-loss diets that cut calories by cutting overall consumption, instead of draconian elimination of intake. Wansink finds the greatest value in retraining one's mind and its perceptions by devices such as making sure one's plate contains at least half vegetables or salad. He suggests that a dieter will automatically eat less in social situations by being the last to start eating and the first to finish. He assesses the dangers of food shopping in bulk-portion stores, where customers are virtually begged to overconsume. Wansink's dual approach emphasizing food knowledge and self-knowledge offers a sensible route to permanent weight loss. A useful appendix arranges different popular diets in tables along with their advantages and disadvantages. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; 1 edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553804340
• ISBN-13: 978-0553804348
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.9 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (231 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm a professor whose mission is to help transform people's lives by finding the small changes that make the big difference. Most of my work is around food psychology and changing behavior -- what and how much someone eats.

For the past year, I've had an incredible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was offered a Presidential appointment to be the Executive Director for USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) -- it's the group in charge of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines and the Food Guide Pyramid (MyPyramid). We're doing lots of great things, but I'll return to Cornell as a Professor on January 21st 2009, when the new administration starts. In the meantime, check out MyPyramid.gov.




Okay, now here's the official boring bio:

Brian Wansink (Ph.D. Stanford 1990) is author of the best-selling book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (Bantam 2006) and of Marketing Nutrition (UIllinois Press 2005).

He is the John Dyson Professor of Consumer Behavior at Cornell University, where he directs the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. Previously, has been a professor of Nutritional science and of Marketing at Dartmouth College, the Vrije Universiteit (The Netherlands), the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, INSEAD (France), and he was a visiting scientist at the U.S. Army Research Labs in Natick, MA.

His award-winning academic research on food psychology and behavior change has been published in the world's top marketing, medical, and nutrition journals. It has been presented, translated, reported, and featured in television documentaries on every continent but Antarctica.

The research findings of he and his colleagues have also contributed to the introduction of smaller '100 calorie' packages (to prevent overeating), the use of taller glasses in some bars (to prevent the overpouring of alcohol), and the use of elaborate names and mouth-watering descriptions on some chain restaurant menus (to improve enjoyment of the food).

An Iowa native, he lives with his family in Ithaca, NY, where he regularly enjoys both French food and french fries.


BRIAN WANSINK
John Dyson Chair of Marketing and of Applied Economics
Director - Cornell Food and Brand Lab
110 Warren Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-7801

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

136 of 143 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Lose Weight Without a Diet Using Simple and Practical Advice! October 20, 2006

By D. Buxman TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Dr. Wansink is a food psychologist who specializes in the investigation of the mental and emotional factors that cause us to eat. This book demonstrates that we can lose weight, simply by being more mindful of our eating habits. It contains interesting and humorous case studies that highlight those mindless activities that add 200 or 300 calories to our diet each day and which can add up to 20 or 30 excess pounds in the course of a year.

The author provides practical suggestions at the end of each chapter that will help you to make the simple changes that will allow you to lose 2 or 3 pounds per month without resorting to conventional diet techniques that are doomed to failure. Although this book is based upon scientific research and extensively end-noted, it is enjoyable to read, easy to understand and quite funny at times.

This book is a great value for the money and the five or six hours that it will take to read it.

75 of 78 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Non-Diet Book September 12, 2007

By Kristen Willard

Format:Paperback

At the beginning, I wasn't very surprised with the ideas in this book. Everyone knows a smaller plate means you eat less. But it is so much more than that. It had the feel of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point with innumerable studies to explain our relationship with food. After reading Mindless Eating I understand why Doritos just introduced "two-flavor" bags of chips. My high school children really enjoyed listening to the studies and we've been applying them in the kitchen. It turned out to be the best non-diet (but lose weight) book I've read.

72 of 76 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a Sane Look at "Dieting" October 14, 2007

By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Brian Wanskik, who conducts eating research in a strange experimental restaurant lab, uses his findings well in this fun-to-read book about the subtle sensory cues that encourage us to eat more than we should. Using common sense and science, he debunks all fad diets as creating more harm than good and then proceeds to show that biologically speaking our optimum weight-loss rate should be no more than a half a pound a week so we don't short-circuit our metabolism. Throughout the book, he peppers his chapters with "Reengineering Strategies." If we follow these easy-to-follow strategies, we will cut our calories between 100-200 a day, an amount that Wansik argues it the best for losing weight while keeping our metabolism active. He also devotes time to "Diet Danger Zones," so that we can see the warning signs of destructive eating habits and bad eating environments. While he does debunk most diet books, he makes an exception with The Volumetrics Eating Plan by Dr. Barbara Rolls.