Book #72: Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink

As is probably obvious, I am a not-so-secret fan of nonfiction, particularly nonfiction that describes scholarly social science research in a popular way so anyone can understand it. I think it stems back to Freakonomics, which was the first-ever book of nonfiction I read when I was much younger, and which totally rocked my world. I found it so interesting because it was so applicable and describing things in real life--and I've continued to love books like that ever since. Mindless Eating focuses on research having to do with food and how we eat (as should be obvious from the subtitle of the book). Wansink is the head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, where they basically do tons of studies about how our environment influences what and how much we eat. For example, the bigger your plate, the more you serve yourself, and the more you eat. The shorter and stouter your cup, the more you pour yourself, and the more you drink. The healthier a food bills itself to be ("Low fat! No Carbs! Gluten Free!"), the more you eat. When you eat while watching TV or with any type of distraction like reading or conversation, you eat more. The Food and Brand Lab have done a number of really fascinating studies where they bring people in and put them through an experiment, usually where they offer them food in a certain situation to see what they do with it, and the results are pretty consistent. We eat mindlessly, and we do so all the time.

One interesting thing about the book is that it doesn't bill itself as a diet book, but it does offer suggestions for takeaways for readers to improve their own eating habits now that they have the knowledge offered in the book. Lots of them are just small changes in habits that you can make, like serving out portion sizes in small bowls instead of eating chips straight from the bag. At the end of the book, he suggests making three small changes in your eating habits and keeping track of them for a month, instead of going on a big diet. I really like that idea--I feel like we've been doing a really great job at eating relatively healthy (particularly lately), but there are ALWAYS things we can do to improve. I want to be sure we eat at least some fruit and vegetable at both lunch and dinner as much as possible (even if it's just lettuce on the sandwich), so I think that's one goal we'll make. Of course, we are coming up on the holiday season, and we'll be visiting family for three weeks and won't have as much control over what we're eating, but it's never a bad time to start trying to be healthier.