Mindless Eating

Hi Class,

I wanted to post about some of my experiences dealing with and investigating how what we eat and how much we eat is affected by our mental status in terms of preconceived or learned notions/habits (like saying we don't like something when we've never actually tried it). My interest into this subject was sparked when I read "Mindless Eating," by Brian Wansink--if you haven't read it yet I highly recommend that you do!
Brian Wansink is the current Chair of Marketing at Cornell University and has devoted much of his life to understanding how humans interact with their eating environment (and I believe his second book either just came out or is very close to being published).

 Mindless Eating provides examples of small scale and large scale experiments he performed alone or in collaboration with his students or other entities (including the military) which provide insight into how we interact with our food--and why.

As an example for those less familiar with his work; in Mindless Eating, Brian described an experiment he conducted to test a person's level of awareness about how their eating habits and their mindfulness was influenced or changed based on an altered meal experience.

The restaurant he used was called "The Spice Box," which was disguised as a fine-dining establishment but in actuality was a giant food testing laboratory. Plates had hidden weight scales, lighting and music were carefully controlled, and all employees were actually student researchers. The employees but not the patrons were aware of an invisible 'line,' between two halves of the restaurant that represented a divide between what patrons on the right side of the restaurant would experience for their dinner from patrons on the left. (So maybe patrons on the left received smaller plates than patrons on the right as an example of this division).

In this particular experiment to test awareness there was only one single change made from the right side to the left side of the Spice Box. Patrons on the left were to receive complementary wine which they were told came from a new vinyard in California while patrons on the right were to receive wine which they were told was from a new vinyard in Iowa (or thereabouts but somewhere not associated with fine vinyards).
Everything else was the SAME between halves. Same food, same atmosphere and even...the SAME wine! The trick in this research was that both sides did receive the same absolutely rubbish local wine. It was so bad the locals actually called it "two-buck chuck," because it was only $2 a bottle.

So what happened? Did both halves of the restaurant spit up their wine and leave disgusted?

On the contrary; the half of the restaurant that believed they had wine from California stayed over an hour (so long that they had to be rushed out for the next batch of subjects) ate almost all of their food and rated their experience as overall superb. On the other half patrons who thought their wine was from Iowa ate only half their meal on average and left as quickly as they could rating their experience as overall negative.

…… wait what?

It was the SAME wine. So what caused the difference in experience? It was purely mental. Because patrons on the side that received wine ONLY FICTIONALLY from Iowa— believed their wine was from a bad area or an area not known for good wine they put the cabbosh to their whole experience so that even the food was rated poorly.

What's more incredible is that when researchers contacted the participants and asked if they believed they were mindless about their actions and how they rated their experiences they said, "No, I was not." Both sides had the same answer and refused to admit that the single perception about their wine changed their dining experience. When we have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that they were.

The point to his research is that everyone falls victim to mindless eating and we all refuse to admit it.
So during my Community internship last year my preceptor allowed me to run with this inspiration and present to 10 different senior lunch locations about "Mindless Eating." But we wanted to make sure our audience didn’t fall victim to the same thought as the people in Brian’s research so often do and probably the people reading this right now—It’s fine to read or hear about because it doesn’t happen to me.

This is what we did; at the beginning of the presentation for every single group my preceptor and I asked the audience if they wanted to play a game as an ice breaker and to get everyone interested. We then passed around pieces of paper and pencils to all participants and asked them just to write down HOW MUCH THEY WOULD EXPECT TO PAY OR PAY in a restaurant for different dishes we were going to describe. That’s all they needed to do, just listen to our descriptions and write down what they think they would pay for the dish.

We read a TOTAL OF 6 dish descriptions to the participants and collected all their pieces of paper. Then I would continue with the presentation and describe Brian’s work, coming back to our game at the very end of the material I had.

I told the audience that I tricked them. What my preceptor and I actually described to them were the SAME three dishes. One description was extremely detailed and savory sounding (with words like decadent or delicious) and one was extremely plain (like baked chicken with garlic). While I had been talking my preceptor tallied up the responses (which had been labeled for each guess against our key) and had averages of their own answers by this point in the presentation.

I then asked the audience if they thought they answered that they would pay more for dishes I described in more savory detail…they said no absolutely not.

Every single presentation I did fell for the same trick. They all said that they would pay more for a dish that simply sounded more expensive—but was the same thing!

I obviously find this kind of research crucial to understanding why we eat what we eat. I think our minds play tricks on us all day long, like a cognitive distortion that’s build into the way we conduct and navigate our eating environment.

Brian actually states in his book, “The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on,” and I couldn’t agree more. Instead of stressing yourself out all day about calories etc just get tiny plates. You’ll think you’re eating just as much as before and you’ll naturally lose weight without changing the rest of your life. Then you add more fruits and vegetables, then you add some exercise. I think understanding this interaction is key to understanding and reversing overweight/obesity.

What do you think?