Brian Wansink has conducted some amazing experiments at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. He studies why people eat the way they eat. Why are people so easily tricked into overeating? The answer according to Wansink is that people eat mindlessly. That is, people eat more than they think they are eating!

Everyone makes about 200 food choices in a day. And that is supposedly for 3 meals in a day! Every time we see a food temptation, we have to make decisions over and over again. To eat or not to eat! To eat or not to eat!

How much we eat really depends on what is around us. The 2 main factor that influences what we eat and why we eat is visibility and convenience. If food is visible and within convenient reach, we would most probably eat it! Place a cookie jar within convenient reach of an office worker and expect him to eat considerable amount of cookies.

We will continue to eat until there is a cue to stop. Its amazing then that we actually eat with our eyes instead of our stomachs.

Eating directly from a bag/container, eating while distracted watching TV or talking to a friend or eating in the car all result in mindlessly overeating.

In one interesting experiment, Wansink gave a group of couples a full meal. He then invited all the couples to the movies and handed them popcorn at the entrance. The couples were randomly given either a large bag of popcorn or a medium bag of popcorn. While watching the movie, the couples mindlessly ate the popcorn. The ones with the large bag ate more popcorn. And the most intriguing part was that they were all given 2 day old stale pop corn. Some of the people who ate the popcorn said that it tasted like styrofoam! But they still mindlessly ate it while being distracted with the movie!

There is a fascinating CNN interview with Brian Wansink that you must watch.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFjqEQgkxsQ&feature=related]