A Review of "Mindless Eating"

After reading Brian Wansink's "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think" (2006, Bantam Books), you'll never look at the meals and snacks you eat the same way again.

And that's a good thing.

As the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and Nutritional Science at Cornell University, Wansink has spent his career studying what makes people eat the foods they do, and why. And the answers he has found are often both surprising and instructive.

One of the things Wansink has learned through his research at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab is that we often make decisions about the foods we like and dislike based on many reasons other than how they taste. Brand names, labels, color, plate size, presentation and more can make us think something tastes better or worse than, or even different from, the way it actually does.

"We all think we're too smart to be tricked by packages, lighting, or plates," Wansink writes at the beginning of "Mindless Eating." "We might acknowledge that others could be tricked, but not us. That is what makes mindless eating so dangerous. We are almost never aware that it is happening to us."

Throughout "Mindless Eating," Wansink describes numerous fascinating results of food studies he and others have conducted, including:

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• Movie-goers served free popcorn in large bucket ate more - an average of 173 calories more - than those given small buckets … even though the popcorn was stale and five days old.
  
• World War II sailors who complained that the ship's kitchen offered no cherry Jell-O stopped griping when the cook added red food coloring to the lemon Jell-O; to them, because it was red and they didn't know otherwise, the Jell-O tasted like cherry.
  
• Diners served free glasses of the same red wine rated it less favorably when it was labeled as "North Dakota" wine rather than "California" wine. The "North Dakota" wine-drinkers also ate less of their meals and left their tables sooner than those served "California" wine.
  
• More than half the people told they were taste-testing a new type of strawberry yogurt in the dark reported the sample had a good strawberry taste … even though they were all actually served chocolate yogurt.
  

"Our 'taste' resides in our head as well as our mouth," Wansink writes. "We often taste what we think we will taste. In the same way that mindless eating can lead us to overeat, our expectations about the taste of a food can 'trick our taste buds,' making us think a food tastes much better or worse than it actually does."

Even after we are told how our perceptions alter what we taste and how we eat, the effects of presentation, color, etc., still has an impact on our eating habits. Knowing this, Wansink writes, we can all change the way we serve, dine and snack to eat more healthfully and, if we need to, lose weight without feeling deprived.

"We may not be able to outlaw every drive-through restaurant or tax every pint of ice cream in our community, but we can reengineer our personal food environment to help us and our families eat better," Wansink writes. "We can turn the food in our life from being a temptation or a regret to something we guiltlessly enjoy. We can move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating."

Wansink then offers a "mindful" eating plan that can help anyone eat better and less by gradually building new eating habits over time. It's no drastic lose-weight-quick or get-healthy-overnight plan, he says, but that's the point.

"The best diet is the one you don't know you're on," Wansink concludes.

A simple enough observation, but the way Wansink proves that point over and over again in "Mindless Eating," a revolutionary one as well.