Mindless Eating

Borrowed this from my Health Editor friend who had it on her shelf. I remember being curious about it when it came out. By Brian Wansink, PhD, it's addressed the growing amount of obesity in the U.S. by examining how various cues can cause us to overeat. He's basically a sociologist -- a food psychologist, I think is his official title -- who did all kinds of experiments involving making it harder or easier to eat. The "bottomless soup bowl" is one people seemed to report on when the book came out. He and his grad students (at Cornell, he's the director of their Food and Brand Lab) created a setting where they could keep a bowl of soup perpetually filled, so that the "stop eating" cue of an empty bowl never happened. Not only did people eat and eat, they didn't have any awareness that their soup wasn't disappearing at the right rate.

Anyway, all kinds of stuff like that. Most of it is "obvious", but a number of chapters address how even the obvious goes unnoticed by all of us. Even experts, even well-educated knowledgeable people, even the author himself. A pretty powerful argument for putting more veggies on your plate, and making your plate smaller in the first place. But the best part is how readable it was, fun, and not opaque in the slightest.