Industry Figure Tom Chappell

I recently finished reading an absolutely riveting book (Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink) on this very subject. The author is the Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, and he and his team have done some fascinating research on the external environmental cues which signal us to eat, or to stop eating.

To quickly (and somewhat brutally) sum up the book, his group has found that we are all subtly influenced by these environmental cues to eat more or to eat less, and that if we consciously manipulate our environment so that it influences our unconscious to eat less, then we can easily eat less, and lose weight.

Not all of the effects are especially large, but they don’t have to be to add up to a large difference.

I’ll serve up some practical suggestions in coming posts, but let me just start with one of the things that they did that made me laugh:

The researchers, in conjunction with a movie theater, popped up enough popcorn for everyone in the theatre, and then let it…ripen…until, after about five days, the pocorn was so stale that it squeaked when you bit into it.

Then, one Saturday, everyone who came to see a particular matinee for an action movie got a big free bucket of the terrible popcorn, more than they would eat. Randomly, half were given the “medium” size, which in a movie theatre means that they got way, way too much popcorn, and half were given the “large, bigger than your head” size.

Everybody also got a free beverage.

The researchers spied on the moviegoers, and found that they would take a few bites of the horrible popcorn, then set the bucket down on the ground, and pretty soon would pick it up again and nibble some more.

When the movie was done, the reasearchers came on the P.A. and asked everyone to bring up their buckets to the front, and weighed them, to see how much popcorn each person had eaten from his bucket. They also asked the people with the large buckets if they thought that they had been influenced to eat more.

Almost to a man, the patrons smugly denied being influenced, but the people with the large buckets ate 53% more popcorn, an average of 173 calories more per person.

Container size implies portion size.