Brian Wansink Quotes
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Secretaries who had been given candies in clear desktop dishes were caught with their hands in the candy dish 71 percent more often (7.7 versus 4.6 times) as those given white dishes. Every day that dish was on their desk they ate 77 more calories. Over a year, that candy dish would have added over five pounds of extra weight. What is a little bit scary is that none of them would have probably known where those pounds came from.
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At high levels, all of us—normal weight and overweight alike—underestimate calorie levels with mathematical predictability.
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Is It Baby Fat or Real Fat? The answer partly depends on the parents. A study of 854 Washington State children under three years old showed that a child is nearly three times as likely to grow up obese if one of his parents is obese. If you’re overweight, your child has a 65–75 percent chance of growing up to be overweight. So, is that little paunch on your fourth grader baby fat? Not if you’re sporting the same paunch.
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In fact, diet comes from a Latin word which means a way of life.
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Your Mindless Margin. By making 100–200 calorie changes in your daily intake, you won’t feel deprived and backslide. • Mindless Better Eating. Focus on reengineering small behaviors that will move you from mindless overeating to mindless better eating. Five common places to look (diet danger zones) include meals, snacks, parties, restaurants, and your desk or dashboard. • Mindful Reengineering. To trim your mindless margin, you can use basic diet tips, but a more personalized approach is to use 1) food trade-offs, or 2) food policies. Both give you a chance to eat some of what you want without making it a belabored decision. • The Power of Three. Design three easy, do-able changes that you can mindlessly make without much sacrifice. • Mindless Margin Checklist. Use this daily checklist to help you move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.
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Beware of the health halo. The better the food, the worse the extras. People eating ‘low-fat’ granola ate 21 percent more calories, and those eating ‘healthy’ at Subway rewarded themselves by ordering cheese, mayo, chips, and cookies. Who really overeats—the guy who knows he’s eating 710 calories at McDonald’s, or the woman who thinks she’s eating a 350-calorie Subway meal that actually contains 500 calories?
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Interestingly, however, we found that participants consistently underestimated their intake of the candies on their desks yet overestimated how much they ate when the candies were farther away.
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People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period.
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In one study, people who listened to a lunchtime radio mystery show ate 15 percent more than those who didn’t. The basic rule: distractions of all kinds make us eat, forget how much we eat, and extend how long we eat—even when we’re not hungry.
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We overeat because there are signals and cues around us that tell us to eat. It’s simply not in our nature to pause after every bite and contemplate whether we’re full. As we eat, we unknowingly—mindlessly—look for signals or cues that we’ve had enough.
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Even though I was appointed by the White House to be executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agency in charge of the 2010 United States Dietary Guidelines, and even though I am a past president of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, I still don’t think most nutrition education is very effective. People know that an apple is better for them than a Snickers bar, but . . . they eat the Snickers bar anyway.
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If a wave of veganism washed over the land, in six months there would be Broccoli Kings, Taco Bell Peppers, and McTofu Drive-Thrus.
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If you want to be skinny do what skinny people do.
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People were almost twice as likely to reach for a comfort food when they were happy than when they were sad.
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There's only one thing that's strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit.
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As long as we believe it is food that causes us to overeat, we are lost. Television, friends, and weather seem pretty unrelated to what we eat. That’s why they have such a powerful effect on us.
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It’s about as close to an established fact as things get in the social sciences: People who watch a lot of TV are more likely to be overweight than people who don’t.
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Moods, however, do seem to influence what we choose to eat. People in happy moods tended to prefer healthier foods, such as pizza or steak. People in sad moods were much more likely to reach for ice cream, cookies, or a bag of potato chips.
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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.
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But the real concern is with obese people. They typically underestimate how much they eat by 30 to 40 percent. Some think they eat half as much as they actually do.14
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The consequences of not serving chocolate milk are that many don’t drink milk at all. We discovered that when eleven Oregon schools banned chocolate milk, 10 percent fewer kids drank milk, 29 percent more of the white milk taken was thrown away, and 7 percent fewer kids ate school lunches.
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The beauty of impulse eating may be that you end up eating less—when you do eat—than someone who has been thinking about the food for hours. The more you think of something, the more of it you’ll eat.
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Big dishes and big spoons are big trouble. As the size of our dishes increases, so does the amount we scoop onto them. They cause us to serve ourselves more because they make the food look so small.
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In other words, volume trumps calories. We eat the volume we want, not the calories we want.