[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 207th episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. Everyone calls me Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in a whole host of ways. Graphic novels, animated videos, music videos, pocket guides, and of course, our student conference. Today we are joined by Brian Wansing. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind all of you that are joining us on YouTube, Zoom, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. You can use the comment section to type in your questions, and we will get to as many of them as we can. Brian Wanczyk is a food psychologist and author of several books on food marketing, research and nutrition, as well as books popular with consumers such as Mindless why we eat more than we think, and Slim by design. Mindless eating solutions for everyday life. After completing his PhD at Stanford, he went on to teach at Dartmouth, Wharton, University of Illinois, and Cornell, where he and his students conducted research in his food and brand lab, where they sought solutions to improve healthy eating, which could be deployed at scale. So, Brian, thank you for joining us.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: It's great to be with you. Thank you very much.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: So, in doing research for this interview, I discovered you have a passion for playing saxophone, rock bands.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: It's actually funny you say that, because 15 minutes after this interview is over, we. I have to leave for a show. So it's. I play in a Motown band. Saxophone in a Motown band. And we play all over the area. So it's really cool. We dress up in those crazy suits and everything, but it is, I tell you, you do that makes you feel like you're 13 years old. It's so, so much fun.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Well, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but Brian and his three daughters are coming to our student conference in DC later July. And I don't know, maybe we need to have a little musical interlude to discuss. To discuss. All right, so, full disclosure, Brian is a new donor to the Atlas Society.
And as mentioned, those who are joining us at our student conference and gala in DC are going to have the opportunity to meet him. But my professional connection with Brian actually goes back over 20 years to when I started the Dole Nutrition Institute on behalf of Dole food company owner David Murdoch, which we also had a lab, a Dole nutrition lab.
And so it was in that capacity that I first started following Doctor Wansig's research and interviewing him and of course, picked up and read mindless eating. So all of these tabs are from way back then.
So what got me hooked wasn't just, you know, all of the great anecdotes and experiments that you present in the book, but as an objectivist, somebody who wants to be logical and in touch with reality, I thought it was fascinating how all of these other factors get in the way of being objective about our diets and our health. So let's start there with your concept of the mindless margin and why, as you claim, quote, the best diet is the one that you don't even know that you're on.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: That's right. You know, if you talk to the smartest person who's brilliant in every way, they wouldn't be able to tell you why they had super salad for lunch because they could rationalize something, but they just have no idea of all the little influences that sort of touched them. Whether it be what the person over there did, whether it be the order of things on the menu, whether it be the look that the server gave when they said something, and the fact that all these decisions are just so so at a low level of consciousness. That's why we get influenced by all these crazy things. But you asked about that. You mentioned the mindless margin. So if you look at, like most people, most of us need about 2000 calories to neither gain or lose weight. And if you even eat just 100 calories more than what you need to stay stable over the course of the year, that's ten pounds you gain not even thinking about it. And so when I say the best diet is the one you don't know you're on, is that if you can set something up that gets you to just eat a little bit less than you normally would, let's say 100 calories less a day than you actually need over the course of a year, that that adds up to about ten pounds of weight loss. But the problem is you have to do this in a way where you, where it's not obvious to you that you're eating less than you typically would. Because once we start doing that, things backfire because we go, wait a minute, I eat a little less than I should today. So it means I get an overeat tomorrow.
And that's why the psychology of eating and setting up things around us, so we unconsciously eat a little bit less, ends up being very super useful.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Right? And that also can guard against diet rebounds, right? People lose 50 pounds on a fad diet, but then inevitably gain it all back. And then also, we don't have to get into this deprivation mindset, and these become habits. Right. So not only are you not necessarily being, you know, intentional about what you're doing, but because then it just becomes part of who you are.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: I mean, it's great because it's great to talk to people who, let's say, over the course of a year or two have lost, say, 1015, 20 pounds and say, well, were you dieting or what's going on? They kind of go, no, I don't know what I did differently, and I just seemed, weighed less. But once you start asking kind of probing things, it even sort of unsurfaces in their mind and in their memory what happened. I remember, you know, one person lost, like, I guess, 15 pounds in the air, and she didn't know why, but what it ended up being is that she ended up drinking one last coffee during the day and she's adding so much sugar and cream and stuffed her coffee that all of a sudden.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, so tell us about the summers that you spent with your brother and cousins at the family farm in Iowa, because you share an anecdote in the book that it seems during a summer of low grain prices, you may have started to get the idea that would later cultivate, culminate in the book.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So growing up in Iowa, we might, my dad worked as a production worker in a bakery, and we'd go to, we'd spend summer on our aunt and uncle's family farm, but all of a sudden, there end up being some problems with grain prices, and then all of a sudden, it has a ripple effect with, throughout the entire food chain and stuff. And my dad got laid off for, we didn't know how long it'd be. It'd be maybe eight months or so. And it dramatically influenced both my brother and I in terms of the way we view food. And I guess kind of sort of the way we put it on a different pedestal than we used to. But then we had, like, boy, that was always there, and we weren't kind of worried about whether dad would get in their job or not.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, and remember your uncle, you know, you, you were saying, why aren't we, you know, we used to go to the movies, and why have the movies been cut out? And your uncle said, well, people need to buy more and eat more corn. So maybe some level you were thinking, gee, well, what are the factors that drive people to eat more or eat less? I'm wondering if it was when during your, was it as a teenager or later in life that you discovered Ayn Rand and just the. Basically the philosophy of liberty.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Well, toward when I was 18 or 19 years old, before I went off to college, I really believed that the fortunes of not just small towns, but of families and the little eight year old boys was really dependent upon how well businesses were doing. The better the business did, the better the bread company did, the better the town did, the better the family did, the better, and the less worried little eight year old boys had. So as a super strong believer in the powerful influence that companies have on the welfare of all of us, they do well. People do well. Towns like Sioux City, Iowa, do well. And so it might have been when I was maybe 24, 25, that I. That I first read. Alice shrugged. First they said, what? This is exactly the way that I see things, that the people who have the entrepreneurial spirit and have the free market sort of leanings, they're the ones that are lifting up the entire rest of the world. If they weren't there, wow, we would all be in the world hurt. And so it resonated. It wasn't as much of an epiphany, because I already believe that to begin with. But what she was able to do was to give me a super powerful narrative of the power of an individual in that role.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Now, going back, as I mentioned, to my dole nutrition days, and with summer just around the corner, I remember one particular study that you did at a summer camp involving kids eating drumsticks or having the being served chicken that was already cut up and then eating that with utensils, as opposed to eating the drumsticks with their hands. Do you remember that study? Yes. Yes. And for parents who are wanting to minimize rowdy behavior at mealtime, what were some of the interesting implications?
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Well, one of the things we found is that the more involved kids are with their hands when they're eating, let's say, for instance, eating drumsticks with their hands versus with forks and knives, or eating corn in the cow versus having it cut off or anything like that, the more involved they are with touching things. Two things happen. First, they become much more spirited. Or we could say rowdy, whatever. Yes. And this is the better thing, because, hey, look, a rowdy, a rowdy son or daughter doing something, who cares? You know, that'll pass. You know, you can pick the chicken up off the floor. But the important thing was anything that was presented to kids that they could eat with their hands, they ate more of it. And they're more likely to like that later on, even if it was a bizarre food. So in another set of studies related to that. We would give kids very unusual sort of foreign foods, like things wrapped in grape leaves or stuff like this, things that typically they wouldn't like at all and wouldn't even eat. But if they could play with their food, if they could use their hands, it's great. If they would eat more of it, were more active during the meal. But most importantly, they were much more likely that two weeks later, when we gave it to them, just forks and knives, because they had already shown ownership, they'd already had fun with the food.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: Wow. So you could do that. You could switch it. You could make healthy eating, playing with your food, and that kind of would bond them with the food, and they would like it more.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly right. In fact, after we did some of those studies, when I started doing my, my girls is anything we wanted them to try, we would just kind of put it out in, give them, none of them give them little spoons and forks and ice, but they could just grab it and put it in their mouth. And, uh, having that very volitional sort of, ooh, this is fun sort of thing gave them much better associations with exotic foods.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: All right, um, getting back to the book, its covered, at least this cover has art that conjures up a bucket of popcorn. The popcorn experiment you ran is one of the most famous in your book. So tell us about that. I'm going to step away for a second. I'll be right back. But, yes, tell us about that experiment.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Well, if you talk to most people, why they overeat, and they say, well, you know, the food tasted really, really, really good, or or I was super, super hungry.
And we thought, well, I wonder what would happen if you gave people food that wasn't very good.
Would something like as seemingly innocuous as the size of the popcorn bowl you gave to them, would that have an influence on how much they ate? And you could ask people about that and go, nah, nah. Wouldn't influence anything I eat because I just eat when I'm hungry or when the food tastes great.
And so we did this set of studies. It was up in a. It was up. We did it in a number of places, but one place we did, it was up in, up in Chicago, and we went to a movie theater. And when people came, we said, hey, I think it was Illinois History Month or something. So we said, oh, because of Illinois History Month, we are going to give you free popcorn. And they're either given this horrible, this popcorn in a huge, huge bucket. You know, the one that costs, like, you know, $12 or smaller bucket, like, when they half the size cost like $11.95, you know, but this wasn't good popcorn. This is popcorn we'd had sitting out in humidity for, in some cases, up to three to ten days, and you couldn't even crunch it. It's like eating those styrofoam packing pellets.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Right.
So some of the feedback that the viewers, you know, and the popcorn eaters gave you.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And when we ended up finding out that the people who ate that, it didn't matter whether they're given good tasting popcorn or this horrible tasting popcorn, they still ate, oh, it was about 30% more from the huge bucket than they did from the small bucket. But when we said, hey, you ate, you know, 600 calories more, do you think the size of the bucket had anything to do with it?
Almost to a person, you go, no, no, that's crazy, man. How could it? You know, I just. I just. I just eat if the food tastes really good or if I'm really, really hungry.
Neither was the case. And they still end up overeating.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Well, even just the way that you were saying that some of the other research that you present in the book is how your gender, whether you're a male or a female, how that influences what you eat in certain circumstances and the assumptions. Right. So maybe talk a little bit about that.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: So, I mean, that's really neat because that, you know, we all talk about comfort foods and things like this. And one of the, we did this study with, like, maybe about, you know, a 1004 people or something like that, where we asked them to list their very, very, very favorite comfort foods. Okay. And.
And what we found is that for the women, for the men, we'll start with that. We'll say they would list steamed hamburgers and pizza, and the ice cream was one.
And pasta, I think, were the top five. Some comfort foods, pasta or soup. But we asked the same question to the females, and their top foods were ice cream was on both lists, but theirs were cake, cookies, chocolate, and that's what theirs was. But they're all these very quick, easy to eat sort of healthy foods for the most part. When we ask them, we say, wait a minute. Don't you like steak or pizza or hamburgers? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I like them.
But when I think of them, I don't think comfort. I think somebody had to make those for my dad when I was growing up. It's typically my mom. And I don't see, I don't get comfort out of something that I look at. I think it's going to be work. And that was so amazing, to think that comfort foods weren't just driven by.
By the taste and the sensory qualities, but it's also based on this set of associations that you would have that could really trip people up. But I'll give you another. This is kind of a cool example, and it's very relevant today. I mean, actually, right now, it's in France. It's June 6, which is D Day. And we did a study with World War two veterans, and we asked, and because one of the things we were finding is that we were wondering whether their experience overseas influenced whether they. What food they liked. And one thing we found really odd with Pacific veterans, okay, is that they either loved or they hated chinese food. There's just. There's no middle ground. Nobody kind of goes, oh, it's okay. They just thought it was the greatest thing in the world, or they hated it. And one of the things that we were able to find was that their associations with this food were totally determined by what had happened to them when they were overseas. If they were a marine fighting in wild canal or seen lots of action, just the thought of rice, that the thought of anything chinese or japanese or just asian anyway, was just horribly aversive to them. But if they were over there but didn't see the horrible combat, but they were, let's say, you know, in this, you know, a radio person, or they were, you know, somebody who did something on a ship or they were in the typing pool or something, they loved this because the association that they had with this asian food, whether it be japanese, chinese, or whatever, the association they had was, wow, that was a time in my life when I was overseas. I seen exotic things. I saw things I never saw before. And all that comes back to me when I eat that food now. Exact same food, two different reactions.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
Thinking of that right now, personally, do not like coffee, actually. I don't like the smell of it. I don't drink it.
You know, I don't like it at all. And the way you've described this, I'm thinking back to when I was in college and I was taking no dos. I was drinking ten cups of coffee a day. I was staying up around the clock to try to study harder. And maybe that's why I'm like, no, no coffee for me.
All right, we're going to get backed up on these questions here. So I'm going to dive into the pot and pick a few Candice Morena, our friend, always here, very often first asks, is there any particular reason schools in other countries seem to provide healthier meals for their students in comparison to here in the US?
[00:21:59] Speaker B: I think that's an interesting question. And Candace, actually, I can speak of that theoretically, but I can also speak it practically. Practically because I have a daughter now who's living in France when she's living in Slovakia. And the french meals are amazing. It just hands down, my wife went to culinary school in France, and these meals are amazing. But they're not free.
The meals of Slovakia are.
They have less variety. They tend to be much more kind of meat and potato based, and they are not free.
Here in the United States, if you are below a certain income level, depending on the size of your family and everything, your school lunch will be free. And part of what is going on is in order to provide food, make sure every kid can have something to eat. I think some school food districts have to cut some corners and they've got to make some sacrifices to make that happen.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: And so really a financial primarily, you.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Know, I think that's one thing because I think it's, in some ways, it's, you know, it's worth it if one of the things it provides is food to kids who otherwise would be going hungry for lunchtime.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: Right?
[00:23:34] Speaker B: So it's a trade off that the US Department of Agriculture Food school districts.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: Of May, my modern Gauld on Instagram asks, what do you say to those who claim that food companies intentionally add ingredients to ultra processed foods to make them addictive? Well, I would say that some, you know, I don't know if it makes them addictive, but definitely pretty well known within the processed food industry that like salt. Right. That people are going to want to eat more. And I remember when I was at Dole, somebody from the packaged food department said, hey, we should increase the salt in this because people will want to eat more of them. And I was like, do you know who the company is owned by? This guy is, you know, completely is on a crusade to improve people's nutrition. So that that did not fly. But what are your thoughts, Brian? You were, you know, took money from this, but you probably had some exposure to them.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, quite a bit. Well, if you look at, there's. There's four things that we really, really, really like. Just human beings inherently love, okay?
[00:24:56] Speaker A: We love evolution.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: Salt, and we have to have salt. Otherwise we thirst. If. If we didn't, you know, retain enough water, we love sugar. And that makes sense, too, because if we didn't have a taste for sugar.
If we were wandering around out in neanderthal land and we started eating berries that were sour, then we'd be dead, okay? But the sweet berries, we just say, oh, yeah, tastes good. So we develop a taste for sweet. We also develop a taste for fat because that carries us through. And we have a taste for dairy. That can change over the years, but we have that. And the thing is, if you say, you know, food companies, they know that they add salt, sugar, fat, and dairy things, it's like, you know, they are guilty of that. And just as guilty as your grandmother was, just as guilty as your mom is, just as guilty as you probably are when you're having a dinner party and you're saying, I really want people to have a good time and really enjoy themselves, maybe I'll add a little bit more sugar or salt.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Now, this is a fascinating question as well from Zach Carter on LinkedIn, essentially asking, how is inflation going to be impacting eating? He asks, do you think eating habits are going to become better or worse with the rise of inflation and shortages and a lot of people saying they're having trouble just covering their grocery bills.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you look at the amount of money that people are spending on food, it's a huge percentage of that money is money they're spending on convenience. Okay? Not necessarily fast food, but it's money they're spending so that they don't have to cook anything so they can warm something up, so they can just do carry out and not have to make anything.
And to the extent that that is what they're paying for, at some point they're going to say, what price is that? Convenience for me, if I can make hamburgers for our family and for five people, it's going to cost roughly $4 in food ingredients.
Maybe going to five guys and spending $45 doesn't make as much sense.
So what I would think would happen with inflation is it may not change what people eat, but it's going to change how much they're willing to pay for convenience versus doing it themselves.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: All right. On Instagram, MG Guris asks, what does this have to do with free markets? So I can tell you that the Atlas Society asks, which is the program that we have every week. We are about a lot of things, but we are fundamentally about objectivism and objectivity. And that is really what the premise of Brian's book is, is mindless eating, is that there are a lot of unconscious factors in what that are influencing how we eat. And yet all of us, according to his research, we all think, oh, no, no, no. We are intentional. We know what we're doing. Yes, I ate 60% more of this awful stale popcorn, and that was because I was hungry, not because of the size of the container. So being aware of those influences and leveraging them one way or another, which brings up an interesting question that I had for you, Brian, just kind of off the top of my head. So, as I mentioned, I'm here, and I'm staying with my parents and helping to take care of my mother, who is and has always been underweight to the point of being frail. And I have, over the years, battled and tried to find ways, eat more ice cream or this, that, or the other thing, which is not necessarily healthy. But I'm just wondering if, you know, a lot of the examples and the suggestions that you use here, like use chopsticks or get single serve servings rather than going to the big value pack. Could they be reverse engineered for somebody who's trying to gain weight rather than to lose weight?
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Absolutely. In fact, that's what we end up using with children. We take a lot of things that we've discovered, and we just reverse them for children who are, you know, at risk for, you know, not. Not really. I don't want to eat that. You know, I'm not hungry. I just want to eat candy and stuff. So what we've done is we've done tons and tons of studies that show that if you reverse most of these, even for children, all of a sudden, what happens is they end up eating more, but they don't think they are. So. And I know there's some hospitals, we came up with a program for dietitians in hospital settings to move in this direction, and particularly with the self service hospital things.
And some of it ends up being very easy. We end up finding that the average child at home even will eat about 35%, roughly, more of any fruit that is pre cut. They'll also be more likely to eat fruit that's in a fruit basket. And that's pretty easy to do, to get people to eat more. It's just to make it more convenient, more attractive, and more seemingly normal to eat. You know, an apple that's sitting on a fruit basket, that's kind of a normal thing. Where's an apple that's in the bottom of that crispr?
[00:30:57] Speaker A: Yeah. So, Tim, Timothy Lindell on X asks if there are any practices that people can practice to help reset their brain for a healthy lifestyle. So, Tim, I would definitely recommend this book, but also slim by design. Because if I'm right, Brian, what I took away was it depends on who you are and what your particular problems with your diet are that you're trying to solve, so that it's not necessarily a one size fits all, but there's a menu of tricks, right? Sorts of hacks, so to speak.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: Lots of things. Yeah. I mean, so they have a rough plan, is what you're going to do going forward is really good. But, you know, Tim, it brings up a good point about resetting things.
We did a ton of these studies looking at all these crazy fad kind of fad diets. Like, I don't know, the grapefruit diet, where all you use grapefruit for whatever, or the ice cream diet, or the things where you fast for a day. But all these things, we end up looking at all these things, and one of the things we found, and then these were all correlational studies, one of the things we found is it didn't matter what weirdo. I don't mean that judgmentally, what, let's say unusual sort of diet a person went on in terms of, like, limiting themselves to one food or no foods or whatever, is they all had about the same effect on people, which is like, really, how can this be? How can this be? And again, the studies we would do would only run for about ten days, but they all had about the same effect. But what we found, and this is cool, the reason they had these effects is that if all your, if you, let's say you fast all day, tomorrow, the next day, well, all of a sudden you've kind of said, what are crazy amounts of food? I typically eat that I didn't eat yesterday. And it, I feel okay. And, you know, I like food a lot more than I did two days, but I treasure it more. So I'm going to eat a little less. I'm going to be a little more smart about what I eat. And that exact same thing happens if you go on the donut diet or the ice cream diet or the nothing but beef jerky diet. Is that at the end of that diet period or the juice diet at the end of that period, you've come to rethink your food habits and interrupted some of those habits, but then you also like things a little bit differently, or you appreciate or treasure them more as a result. And I think that that is neat, that if a person wants to reset something, almost any of those bad diets or even fasting, the real benefit isn't what happens in the day or two or three, you follow the diet. It's what happens afterwards when you get off it.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: All right, well, I know that we should have put the links to mindless eating in all of the chats, but let's also make sure to put the link to slim by design in case you're, you know, really just want to get to the punch of how to, how to implement these.
All right, so, Brian, since you are a free market guy, we've got a question on from Facebook. Alan Maricopa asks.
No, sorry, that was a different one. Georgie Alexopoulos asks about government regulations and whether the food company. Sorry. Whether government regulation of food and farming has encouraged unhealthy habits in places in comparison to food, like places like european.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Well, I had an incredible experience in 2007 to 2009 in that I was appointed by the White House, by President Bush, to move down to DC and be in charge of the dietary guidelines. And I was, I think, the first non Democrat who had had that position as executive director. And, and I believed that, you know, if we ended up incenting companies to do something to get us to eat a little bit better, that that would be the best way to change the way America eats, because it wouldn't be through legislation, it wouldn't be telling people, you know, outlawing a cookie or shaking a finger at somebody for the cookie, but it'd be doing something where all of a sudden a better alternative came up than a cookie or lower calorie version of cookies came out, or smaller versions, or pre portioned, sub rapid cookies came up. And so what we did back then was we started something called partnering with my plate or partnering with my pyramid. And the idea was that if a company did anything to try to move people in the direction of eating healthier, whether it be healthier versions of their products or whether it be smaller versions of their products or anything, what we would do is we would acknowledge them as being now part of the solution.
And this was only in place for about nine months before President Bush's term ended, and then my term ended also. And in the nine months, we had over 100 companies that got on board and did something. I mean, in some cases, I know there's some companies like Taco Bell would be one, for instance. They didn't change their food at all. But what they did was they came up with tray liners, like whatever, a billion tray liners that told people how they could eat healthier and how different sorts of foods fit into that pattern. So I think there's a lot of creative ways that government could get companies doing things, but it's not by telling them they have to do it. It's not going to legislate. It's by giving them the win win incentive where they do better and people do better.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: Brian, was that Bush 41 or 43?
[00:37:24] Speaker B: 43. 43.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Okay. Because I was a speechwriter in the Bush 41 administration, I was going to.
[00:37:29] Speaker B: Oh, cool.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: Yeah, we had yet another previous life, professional intersection. All right. This one, Brian, is right up your alley because you present several studies about this in your book. Connie Keller on LinkedIn is asking any studies for food consumption in different settings as far as more likely to eat things based on what peers are eating. But you also talk about, you know, the colors and the noise level and the kind of music. So how does the environment influence what we eat, and how can we leverage that to either, you know, 99% of us eat less or my mom eat more.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no, it's a great question. There's a ton of things we can do. Tell you one study we end up doing was we would have people watch different types of movies and tv shows. If you talk to a lot of families, a huge percentage of families don't sit down at a table and eat together, but they eat while they're watching television, while the television's on or while the computer's on or something like that.
And what we did is we changed. We brought people in to eat and to snack. And what we do is we change the type of show they're watching. We give them either something super, super stimulating, exciting, or something super, super boring.
And one of the things that we found was that if the snacks were right next to each other or right next to where you're sitting, if you watch anything really exciting, I think we had them watch the movie the island, which is Ewan McGregor and very exciting movie.
They just, it just becomes kind of this hand to mouth eating.
But if they're watching something boring, it tends to be a little less so.
The interesting difference, though, is if the food is in the other room and they've got to get up and walk to get it, that comes down a whole lot.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: What about lighting colors?
[00:39:44] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, we've never been able to really find a lot with colors, and we've tried a number of things, but we do find. We've done some studies in restaurants and in some cases, what happens in a normal dinner setting, like in your home, the brighter the lights, the more, the faster and the more people tend to eat. But in restaurants, that changes a little bit because what happens is if you look at the darkest parts of a restaurant, they're also the most hidden parts of a restaurant. And I think, and people are more likely to order desserts. They're more likely to order indulgent appetizers if they're sitting in a really dark part of the restaurant. But I think partly it's because, you know, you don't really think, you know, you feel like you're kind of inconspicuous. You kind of feel like you've got a free pass or whatever you want to eat. So that's a dangerous part. To sit is in the dark part of the restaurant if you want to be eating.
[00:40:47] Speaker A: All right. Connie on Instagram, any correlation between children, or adults, for that matter, hunting, growing their food, fishing, or even taking part in the food preparation as children, like how that might impact eating and consumption behaviors?
[00:41:10] Speaker B: Well, you know, when I. What you're doing is you're taking people and you're finding them making them much more involved in the food process. And in a number of the studies we've done, the more involved the people are in doing any aspect of food, even if it's simply setting the table, the better they rate the food as being, the tastier they think if they did anything, they think it tastes better and stuff. But there's some really, that's a great question because there's also some, some stuff we've done with, with families that looked at that look at how kids are involved in the food, in the food preparation. And one of the things that we find is families that are more likely to, where their kids tend to are involved more in the food preparation.
You know, they could set the table, they could be at an opening, a can, or they could, you know, whatever, you know, anything before the meal, almost.
They, regardless of what they do with the food, they all rate the meals as being better, and they rate their parents as being more loving than the group of people who just kind of sat there and said, so.
[00:42:28] Speaker A: These have been fabulous questions, but, folks, I have a few of my own, and we only have about 20 minutes or so left, so. Host's prerogative. I'm going to dive back into my questions, and in rereading your book, I was reminded that you and I both have a lot of admiration for Barbara Rolls and her volumetric approach to weight loss.
I've leaned into it personally whenever I needed to shed a few pounds, boil up big batches of cabbage or cauliflower with butter, you know, and just go to town. So for those watching who are unfamiliar with Rolle's work, maybe you can encapsulate it and outline how that approach can help us painlessly manage weight without deprivation.
[00:43:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, she would argue that we eat with our eyes and not with our stomach.
Basically, if there's a lot of. Whether there's a little bit or a lot of food in front of us, even if it's super, super, super caloric and dense, we are more likely to eat as much food as we can than very little. And we've done a number of things with this where we've had refillable soup bowls. People been eating soup, and they've been eating of a bowl of soup, that the level of the soup would imperceptibly rise as they ate. And they could eat four quarts of soup and they could still be eating, but we stopped them after about 15 minutes. And people eating it out of a refillable soap soup bowl will eat about, I think, about 63% more calories of soup. And if you ask them, wow. Yeah. If you ask them, when you fold it, like, no, I'm going to be full. I still have half a bowl of soup left.
And so this is sort of the idea that if you can take something and really give it a lot of volume, like, let's say you take a salad and you really fluff it up a lot, or you take soup and you just dilute it and add water, you'll perceive yourself as being more full because in your mind, you ate a lot of food.
And this is one thing that we did a ton of studies out in restaurants and stuff where we would simply change the size of a dinner plate from, like, say, twelve inches to, like, ten inches. And if you put, say, 4oz of pasta on a ten inch dinner plate, man, it looks huge. Geez, there's no way I can eat all that huge amount because it fills the plate. You put the same 4oz on a twelve inch plate. You know, you say, wait a minute, this. This doesn't even cover a third of the play.
[00:45:26] Speaker A: I say, can you spare it?
[00:45:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that's sort of the idea, is we end up eating with our eyes and not with our stomach. So anything you can do to make that food look bigger, whether it be a smaller plate, whether it be, you know, whether it be changing its calorie density in some way so you can eat a bigger volume of food even though it's less caloric, all of that automatically gets hardwired into us feeling more satisfied. But having eaten fewer calories all right.
[00:46:07] Speaker A: Big box stores, Costco, Sam's Club and the like. And now these. This may seem like a boon for bargain hunters looking to save money, but the research that you've done has uncovered some serious downsides. What are some of those hidden downsides of the superstores?
[00:46:27] Speaker B: Well, because the volume per unit is so low, we end up buying a whole lot more than we need. And if we're the type of person who eats directly out of the box and directly out of the package and, like, out of that hair tip package or out of the cereal box, it's really dangerous. But the benefit of these stores is there's huge cost savings in a lot of extent, in a lot of cases. And so we, I think for many, many years, my family had, I belong to Price club when it opened back in California, Sam's Club, we belong to BJ's, we belong to Costco. Go to all these places because you can get the benefit of lower cost per unit of food. But if you come back and you repackage it in there, let's say, baggies, or you repackage it in a little Tupperware containers, whatever, you get the benefit of both the cheaper food and the benefit of not overeating it, because you have smaller suggested serving size, because of the smaller ziploc bag, the smaller Tupperware container you put it in. So that's the way. Get around that, right?
[00:47:44] Speaker A: So that you take it, and then you make individual containers, like, you know, you get that big jar of jelly bellies or nuts or whatever your particular downfall is, and then just, yeah, repackage it. So I thought that was a good thing. Now, on a slightly different topic, you left academia in 2019, which in hindsight, may have been fortuitous timing, given what has been playing out with the university campuses over the past four years. First the lockdowns and the mandates, now the madness of these protests.
Many of the academics and educators that we've had on the show, a lot of whom have also left academia, they've spoken of what they sense as an increasingly intolerant, quasi totalitarian atmosphere in higher education. I'm wondering if over the course of your career, if that. If you noticed that, or did it really not show up for you in terms of the department you were in?
[00:48:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So I've always been fortunate because I've either been in business schools or I've been in an agricultural school or applied economic schools, and those. Those tend to be maybe a little bit more insulated from some of the stuff that's going on. But I, but a while back, maybe 2015 or something like that, Mother Jones magazine did an article about me. It's tremendously, tremendously well written, really a wonderful writer. And she did a great job. And I came out here and had dinner with us. We had, the great photographer came out and in it she mentioned that I was libertarian in the magazine. And Jones isn't a very libertarian leading publication, as we know. And I know once that, once that happened, I think things changed a little bit for me in terms of my kind of way.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: I was put a target on your back. Well, and then, of course, working for the Bush administration, because what it seems to me in the interview that I did with John Ellis about the breakdown of higher education is that just year by year, you know, like maybe when you started your career, it was more like maybe 60% on the left, 40%, 30. But then every year that kind of progressive majority has become increasing to the extent where, like today there are, you know, maybe hardly any or no, um, you know, non progressive woke educators. And so that is making for a much less of a diverse, truly diverse education on, on campus.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. There were a couple different occasions, and I, um, two different presidential races, and I think, I think it was, um, one of them might have been when McCain was running.
And we, we gave some money to the, to this campaign, you know, like this presidential fund. And then we did it for another person, too, maybe, maybe Romney, I think. And both times I got a call from the university newspaper and they wanted to do a story on professors that gave money to non democratic campaigns. And, you know, in both years, I think it's like four years apart, what they did was they would, they would, you know, talk. They would mention the people who had given money to the campaigns because that's, it's listed publicly. In both cases, these were front page stories about how could professor who's supposed to be smart be doing this sort of stuff. And both times I gave interviews and it seemed to be newsworthy, worthy enough that it made it on the front page of the paper. Both times that some people would do this. And I think in both newspapers, in both articles, there's only like maybe two of us who would comment to the reporters.
[00:52:26] Speaker A: Wow. Well, those stories wouldn't appear today because perhaps there are no more republicans.
All right. Of course, I couldn't end this interview about mindful eating and healthy weight management without addressing the elephant in the room, which is ozempic and other semiglutide drugs that have taken the market by storm. I know your focus of your research is on eating behaviors as opposed to medical interventions. But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about this personal, professional or otherwise.
[00:53:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's. Anytime you give somebody sort of a, let's say, get out of jail free card, it can really.
It can really unravel a lot of bad behaviors in allied or associated areas, too. Because if all of a sudden, let's say, for instance, person says, yeah, I'm feeling a little budgie, but, you know, rather than doing my sit ups and eating a little bit less, if I take this, I'll be able to get back where I'm at all of a sudden. This concern that I would have, not just weight wise, my concern I have is that that's going to make a person less directed, less focused, less disciplined in a ton of other areas of their lives. And there's.
You'd mentioned last night that, or earlier this evening that I'm in a band. I'm in this Motown band. And one of the guys in the band is a big guy and had been having diabetes and stuff. And all of a sudden, he just lost, like, 80 pounds in five, six months because it was epic. And it's like, wow, this is great, because it's a chance to reset all sorts of other behaviors and kind of almost start fresh.
But that's not what happened.
What it was was a license to let a lot of other things lose a grip on a lot of other things. Because after all, this is a get out of jail free card. Not worry about that anymore.
[00:54:43] Speaker A: Interesting. All right, well, we know that you have a saks date that you have to get to, but maybe just close with your telling us a little bit about the family Meal foundation that you and your wife founded.
[00:54:57] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for asking about that. Wilson. We was doing a study. This is a number of years ago, they found this crazy, crazy conclusion in that we asked people when they're kids, to kind of rate how good of a cook their primary caregiver was, either the mom or their dad.
We got these crazy, crazy things. And that people would rate their, you know, how good of a cook they rated their parents being was also consistent with how much they said that person or their parents loved them. And it's like, that's kind of odd.
But then what was really odd was when we looked at what they said they would eat, so they ate. There's no correspondence between somebody saying their mom or dad was a good cook and what they ate. I mean, they might say, we had hot dog and macaroni every single night. My God, my mom was a great cook. Unbelievable. And it didn't make any sense because it had, it seemed to not objectively relate how good the food was, whether they rated them as good. But what we found is that it's the frequent sea that they ate together as some sort of family unit. You know, either me, which is mom, or just dad, but they ate together, sitting together at a table. That was what made people, kids think, you know, my mom, our dad's a great cook, and my parents really love me. And so one of the things that we think is the easiest change that a lot of families could make or society could make to turn things around within a couple generations, at least a little bit, is to have more regular family meals together, even if it's just a Monday night, more regular family. Because all of a sudden there's a chance to share, you know, what's going on in your kids lives. They feel like they're being listened to and attended to.
They're not just being blown off and fed like they are at school lunches. And so that's the purpose of the family Meal foundation, is to move in the direction of getting a much higher percentage of families to have one more meal a week together than they currently do.
[00:57:22] Speaker A: That's wonderful. And again, in the spirit of mindless eating, it's a doable goal, one that you can check off on your little sticky checklist that you'll put on your refrigerator. And the only other advice was that if you are trying to lose weight and you're a really fast eater, then make sure that you are the last one to start to eat, which is another hack that I took away from the book.
So wonderful. Well, off to saks playing for you.
See you later this summer.
And so thank you, Brian. Thanks to all of you for joining and asking so much, so many fabulous questions. Of course, if you enjoyed this video or any of our other programming, please consider making a tax deductible
[email protected]. donate and be sure to join us next week when immunologist Stephen Templeton joins us to discuss his book, Fear of a microbial Planet. How a germophobic safety culture makes us less safe. See you then.
