Book Review: Mindless Eating
A common joke has an overweight woman stepping up to a fast food restaurant's counter and saying, "I'll have a bacon double cheeseburger, large fries, and a Diet Coke."
We have a complex relationship with food and weight issues. Millions of years of evolution have not adjusted to the abundance of food we now enjoy, and our bodies still respond to food at an unconscious level, causing us to overeat. Marketers study these biological buttons and push them to sell more product—a reality that clouds the free-market/libertarian notion that consumers should take responsibility for their overeating instead of pushing for corporate ethics or government controls on how companies can advertise.
You can probably guess some of the deeply rooted motives that food companies exploit. We're more suggestible when we're hungry. We eat more when food is close to hand. We eat more when we're in a group of overeaters. We enjoy food more when it's presented nicely.
But Brian Wansink's recent book Mindless Eating will stun you with its detailed looks at our urge to overeat. The book draws from his extensive research at Cornell's Food and Brand Lab, where scientists study eating patterns and find surprising results that Wansink narrates in a straightforward tone. Put the word "soy" on a label, and people will like it less than the identical product without the word, even when there's no actual soy in the ingredient list. A wine with a California label gets more praise, and generates more positive feelings about the meal in general, than the same wine with a North Dakota label. Add adjectives to food names—from "succulent" to "free-range"—and diners will prefer the menu, even when it's the same food as the ungarnished text. Serve five-day-old popcorn to two groups, and those with the larger containers will eat more of it as they watch the movie. And like the weight-conscious diner in the "Diet Coke" joke, Subway customers eat more calories than they think because the lean sandwich advertised by the chain provides a "health halo" that blesses the mayonnaise, cheese, and fattier meats a customer adds. Every section is a revelation about the subtle cues that affect our attitudes about the food we eat.
Think knowledge is power? Not in this case. Even if you read the book, your body's subconscious will trap you. Wansink spent a day drilling students with the knowledge that larger containers will cause you to eat more, only to have the students fall for that exact trap a few weeks later. Of course, this is good news for marketers, who leverage these unconscious reactions to sell more product.
But here's the saving grace: You can use the same tricks to help you eat better. At the end of each chapter, Wansink suggests strategies for altering your food landscape in a way that will steer your unconscious to healthier eating. If you have a candy bowl on your desk, move it far enough away that you have to break out of your task to visit it. Buy smaller containers of food, or break a large container into smaller ones, because a serving size is whatever sits in front of you. Improve your dinner parties dramatically by setting the mood, and describing each dish with some extra adjectives. (Which makes you wonder: Do Chez Panisse and its kin make extraordinary food, or does your mind look at the nice setting and per-ingredient provenance and add its own spice?)
The book is sort of a diet book, though not a traditional one. Wansink urges readers to lose weight by eating 100-200 fewer calories a day. He calls this range the "mindless margin," because your body doesn't notice the slight dip in intake, unlike deprivation diets where you starve yourself for short-term weight loss. The standard strategy just makes you crave the foods you gave up, so it's no surprise that 95% of the time, you regain the weight you lost. Or, as Wansink puts it, "The best diet is the one you don't know you're on."
Wansink's weight loss plan will get you back into those tight jeans, but not for next month's party. His diet will only shave 10-20 pounds per year, and it's hard to know how our society's love of instant gratification will mesh with this long-range plan. Former New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton carved off a ton of weight, but publishers lost interest in her story when they learned it took three years of hard work.
It is a testament to the revelations in this book that I wanted more. I wanted tables that would give me a look at the raw data so that I could make my own judgments. And some concepts get relegated to the endnotes. He mentions a scientific basis for Thomas Keller's "two-bite philosophy" but doesn't elaborate. He says we make 200 food decisions a day, but doesn't provide the background for how he came up with that number.
Paradoxically, perhaps, I noticed the book dragged as Wansink described studies that seemed like subtle variations on points he had already established. When I started the book, I read it at every opportunity; towards the end I kept checking to see how much text was left.
I feel like Wansink gave a pass to companies for their marketing practices, no doubt because they help fund his research. To my mind, there is such a thing as corporate responsibility, but Wansink has no problem with allowing companies to use our brain chemistry for their profit. At least he's willing to teach us how to undo the damage those strategies create.
This book was sent to me as a review copy.
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