We all know people (or we are those people) with fierce label loyalty. You simply won’t drink Pepsi if there is no Coke available. If you’re going to gobble down a pint of ice cream, why choose anything else but Ben & Jerry’s? But is this label loyalty really worth it? “A number of studies [...]
Dear Tricia, I've been doing my best to treat myself with care over the past several months. I've noticed; however, that a few of my friends and family members are subtly trying to sabotage my success. They bake me cookies, they don't honor my requests for specific foods when I eat at their homes and [...]
We are creatures of habit…and suggestion. Often the mere mention that something is “delicious” is enough to prepare our minds and taste buds for a taste extravaganza, whether it’s really that tasty or not. Brian Wansink proved this theory on suggestion and its relationship to food in his book, Mindless Eating, where he tested 32 [...]
“Past associations are the most common reason a food becomes a comfort food. Some of these associations can be linked to specific individuals (‘My father loved green bean casserole; we ate it every holiday and on his birthday’)…or specific events (‘My mom always gave me soup when it was cold outside or when I was [...]
Most of us inherently know that people who watch a lot of television are more likely to be overweight, but how bad is it? Well according to Brian Wansink in Mindless Overeating, watching television is considered a “triple threat.” Aside from leading you to eat, it leads you to not pay attention to how much [...]
We all have our own individual take on the best comfort food, based on our own personal history as well as our physiology. With that said, Brian Wansink (author of the book Mindless Eating) researched 1,004 Americans to find out what comforts them the most: “Although potato chips topped the list, 40 percent of the [...]
As we begin to bring more awareness to the moment, the exact moment, when we reach for food, we also begin to notice how quickly we consume food. From Brian Wansink’s book Mindless Eating: Here’s the problem. We Americans start, finish and clear the table for many of our meals in LESS than 20 minutes. [...]
The scent of food can often be more powerful than the food itself. The smell of bacon? Heaven. Or how about an apple pie? Or a turkey baking in the oven? Just like the cartoons, we can almost see ourselves floating in mid-air, mindlessly following the wonderful scents wafting by. Brian Wansink and his research [...]
The Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois looks and feels just like a restaurant. That’s because, in a sense, it is. It’s also a lab where consumer psychologists take a glimpse into the working of the human mind and its relationship to food. One night, half of the restaurant/lab [...]
In a study performed by Brian Wansink (author of Mindless Eating) and his graduate students, he proves that the larger the container put before you, the more you’ll eat. Wansink and his graduate students offered free popcorn to moviegoers one afternoon. Every person who bought a ticket was given either a medium-size or large-size bucket [...]
