http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/dinin ... ei=5087%0A
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The focus is on snack size (not such a huge issue for non-snackers like us). But that's helpful confirmation that we're on track, and there are some other helpful bits.
Some quotes:
Dr. Wansink, who holds a doctorate in marketing from Stanford University and directs the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, probably knows more about why we put things in our mouths than anybody else. His experiments examine the cues that make us eat the way we do.
I love it when scientists back up my hunches. One of the things I've alway especially touted about No-s is that it restores the obviousness of excess.To his mind, the 65 percent of Americans who are overweight or obese got that way, in part, because they didn’t realize how much they were eating.
By reducing input opportunities, no-s reduces drastically reduces the number of food decisions. You'll make better decisions when there are less of them and you can afford to pay more attention to each one.Although people think they make 15 food decisions a day on average, his research shows the number is well over 200.
No-s uses the power of visual cues. An empty plate sends a powerful signal that you're done.Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.
People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.
He's got a book coming out called mindless eating which sounds very sensible.“Will being more mindful about how we eat make everyone 100 pounds lighter next year?” he said. “No, but it might make them 10 pounds lighter.”
Reinhard