Mindless Thinking - Flaws in the Research

Before I go on to identify all the problems I see with Wansink’s book, and therefore with Wansink’s new job of giving out nutritional advice, let me just say that there is much in this book that I don’t disagree with, for example:

• People eat more from larger plates.
• People have to make hundreds of decisions about food every day, most of which are made on a barely conscious level. 
• Names and appearances can make a food more appealing.
• Things other than hunger can lead you to eat more.

I just think these things are largely irrelevant.

Eating a little more or a little less food doesn’t matter, provided that you are eating the right macronutrient mix.  As I described in my Calories In, Calories Out post, the body is pretty good at conserving calories during a shortage.  It’s also pretty capable at burning off extra calories during times of plenty, again provided that the diet does not contain too many carbohydrates.  It is excessive carbohydrate consumption, not excessive food consumption, that fosters the storage of excess calories as fat.

And this is one of my real beefs with Wansink’s research.  Every experiment described in Mindless Eating was conducted with foods high in carbohydrate.  He serves stale popcorn to moviegoers in two different sizes of bucket; the people with the larger buckets ate more.  He gives half of the diners in his research restaurant a regular bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup; the other half get a specially designed “bottomless” bowl that pumps extra soup into the bowl without the diners’ noticing.  The folks with the bottomless bowls eat more.  (Campbell’s tomato soup is high in carbohydrate with no fat and little protein).  He monitors how many chocolate candies secretaries eat from their Secretaries’ Day candy dishes.  (Wow, I wish a researcher would sneakily put a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses on my desk and count them at the end of the day.  They’d get a real schock when they learned that I hadn’t eaten a single one!)  Even his experiments with chicken wings include “low-price BBQ sauce,” surely loaded with sugar.

What if Wansink had done experiments with moderate-protein, high fat, low carb meals?  Would his subjects have eaten more steak from larger plates?  What about a bottomless bowl of a nice creamy lobster bisque thickened with real cream instead of flour?

My second problem with Wansink is that he doesn’t account for the fact that people don’t live in laboratory conditions.  Sure, in the closed system of his lab, people served small bowls of snacks might consume less than people served larger bowls.  From this, he concludes that you can control your snacking by serving yourself a small bowl and leaving the package in the kitchen.  I wonder if he’d think differently if he had his grad students trail the subjects for a few hours after they left the lab - my hypothesis is that more of the “small bowl” people went straight to the vending machine to get another carb fix.  That is to say, the real world is not a closed system.  I may serve myself a small bowl of snacks and leave the package in the kitchen.  But I am probably going to go back and serve myself another bowl, and another, and another, until the snacks are gone.  Reformed (or even current) carbohydrate addicts like me know what I’m talking about.  Raise your hand if you’ve ever started out by serving yourself a half cup of ice cream from a brand-new pint container and ended up, an hour later, going out to buy another pint.  (Migraineur raises her hand.  Migraineur raises both hands, and both feet, actually.  Migraineur doesn’t have enough limbs to count the number of times she did this before Gary Taubes and his New York Times article came to the rescue.)

Now, raise your hand if you’ve ever finished a six-ounce steak, hold the potatoes, and immediately gone out and purchased another.

My third problem is that, while he proves that factors other than physiology lead people to eat more, he doesn’t actually prove that the amounts eaten have any effect on weight.  This is an important enough flaw that it will be the subject of my next post on Wansink’s book.

Next up:  yet another person who doesn’t understand the laws of thermodynamics.