As promised, I’m profiling
three scientists who not only have somewhat contentious scholarship, but also
would seemingly contradict each other – one low-fat proponent and another, a
high-fat diet proponent, both offering insights into food choice and diet. One
is wildly interdisciplinary (Wansink), the other, narrowly trained but with
high personal motivation (Seneff). So from the biochemistry of MIT computer scientist
Stephanie Seneff to ag economist Brian Wansink’s marketing studies that show
how the U.S. is doomed to mindless eating, this next section reviews their
work, especially powerful when they combine disciplines. The more well-known
Robert Lustig, with his strong messages on fructose, is a third scientist I
profile. All are critical thinkers – dealing with business and medical
institutions which are empathetic enough to learn something (albeit slowly)
from their work.
Brian
Wansink
Overeating to excess is one of the seven
capital vices – gluttony. Some treat overeating as an inalienable right – we
even have institutions for it (Thanksgiving Day), as well as entire epochs,
eras, and courts (thinking about King Henry the VIII and Hampton Court) that
celebrated it. It’s one thing to overeat, it’s another to do it mindlessly. Yet
we are not born overconsuming – there is, however, a narrow window. At age 3,
children eat until they are no longer hungry – but by age 5, they begin to eat whatever
volume is in front of them (B 22, 25,175)
We, in the
United States, hardly do anything in the way of food education to start getting
to know better tastes, much less becoming gourmands at it. According to Cornell University’s Brian
Wansink, we eat for volume, not calories – cues are essentially external (how
much is on our plates), rather than internal (whether we are hungry, or full)
(Wansink 2007). It seems impossible to be able to rely on oneself to stop
eating in this “obesigenic environment” in which we live.
Regardless of weight or size, it seems that many of us have problems with paying
attention to internal cues to stop eating.
Eating is mindless. What are the implications of this on how and what we grow,
on the current food system? Enter: Brian Wansink.
Brian
Wansink’s research, part food psychology and part behavioral economics (what
people actually eat), is well represented in his research. I found his early
book (Mindless Eating) by chance, in
Barnes and Noble – it is a book that would propel him into fame and fortune (in
the form of an endowed chair) at Cornell. Rumor has it Cornell paid his University
of Illinois salary for a year (a debt he would have had to repay upon his
return for his sabbatical of writing Mindless
Eating in France) – Cornell couldn’t wait and willingly paid.
In Wansink’s
“laddering interviews,” he shows how the value of feeling satisfied drives
consumer purchases. This economist borrows heavily from other social sciences
to provide multiple streams of data.
For me, a next step in this research would be to look at how food quality (as
measured by percentage of saturated fat, so amount of butter in a mac n’ cheese
dish) affects satiation, a feeling of feeling satisfied, and snacking. I’d also
study questions about the near- hopelessness of reducing sugar in industrial
food production. But, that’s me, not him.
See religious representations of
food. B1 + B2 so rather than the loaves and the fishes,
sermon on the mount, which is fairly prescribed…what he had to start with, we
see the last supper images getting more grandiose…..where the relative size of
the main dish, bread, and plate have increased over the eons BW looked at 52
prominent images of the Last Supper…serving sizes are increasing the eel, fish,
lamb, pork also there, notwithstanding.
Of course Henry VIII, and elsewhere “vomit buckets” who was telling me
this notwithstanding?
Source: Net
