Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

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 clues 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? Whi...

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 2006 Reed Business Information.

A former stand-up comic and director of the USDA’s dietary guidelines, Brian Wansink is a professor at Cornell University and director of the internationally known Cornell Food and Brand Lab. He has been involved in over 250 eating behavior studies, and has made over 1,000 presentations on every continent but Antarctica. He lives with his family in Ithaca, NY, where he enjoys both French food and french fries.