Mindless Eating

Why We Eat More Than We Think

By: Brian Wansink PhD

Narrated by: Marc Cashman

In this illuminating and groundbreaking new book, food psychologist Brian Wansink shows why you may not realize how much you’re eating, what you’re eating–or why you’re even eating at all.

• Does food with a brand name really taste better?
• Do you hate brussels sprouts because your mother did?
• Does the size of your plate determine how hungry you feel?
• How much would you eat if your soup bowl secretly refilled itself?
• What does your favorite comfort food really say about you?
• Why do you overeat so much at healthy restaurants?

Brian Wansink is a Stanford Ph.D. and the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. He’s spent a lifetime studying what we don’t notice: the hidden cues that determine how much and why people eat. Using ingenious, fun, and sometimes downright fiendishly clever experiments like the “bottomless soup bowl,” Wansink takes us on a fascinating tour of the secret dynamics behind our dietary habits. How does packaging influence how much we eat? Which movies make us eat faster? How does music or the color of the room influence how much we eat? How can we recognize the “hidden persuaders” used by restaurants and supermarkets to get us to mindlessly eat? What are the real reasons most diets are doomed to fail? And how can we use the “mindless margin” to lose–instead of gain–ten to twenty pounds in the coming year?

Mindless Eating will change the way you look at food, and it will give you the facts you need to easily make smarter, healthier, more mindful and enjoyable choices at the dinner table, in the supermarket, in restaurants, at the office–even at a vending machine–wherever you decide to satisfy your appetite.©2006 Brian Wansink; (P)2006 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

“[Mindless Eating] does more than just chastise those of us guilty of stuffing our faces. It also examines the effectiveness of such popular diets as South Beach or Atkins, and offers useful tips to consciously eat nutritiously.”—Boston Herald

"Entertaining... Isn't so much a diet book as a how-to on better facilitating the interaction between the feed-me messages of our stomachs and the controls in our heads."—Publishers Weekly

Socially Engineered To Eat!

The concept that stayed with me from the first time I read this book back in 2011 was that: 100 calories per day = 10 pounds per year. To this day that lingers when I am tempted to have a snack but I’m not that hungry, or when I’m looking for some motivation to take one more walk around the block.

I decided to pick the book up again to see if any other helpful tid-bits would implant themselves in my mind, and I came away with a reminder to always be aware of JUST HOW MUCH we are being Socially Engineered to eat crap-food… and way too much of it!

I didn’t find this book as interesting as I did when I first read it, but it’s not because the subject matter is boring – it’s just that I think in general we are all increasingly aware the of the Food Industry’s constant (and sometimes insidious) manipulations of our relationship to food as well as our own personal motivators and so there was not much new in here for me on this second go-round.

So interesting and thought provoking

This book was super interesting and made me think a lot about food, psychology, and marketing. Would highly recommend for anyone interested in the subjects. But the best part is that it's relevant and applicable to most people as we all eat food lol

The read I was looking for on my weight loss journey

This book was so much more practical and less strict than other nutritional books. I’ve been on a journey to fix my eating and the tips provided are the kind of positive, simple adjustments that are actually practical. No definitive you cannot have this and you cannot have that. 10/10 would recommend

Important tips, a bit dry but worth it

Listened while at the gym. Would lose concentration but it was good to hear the tidbits. Got some actionable things to implement in my life, like smaller plates and eating for volume.

Fantastic book

This is one of my absolute favorite books on health and wellness. a fascinating look at how marketing, packaging and environment impact our eating habits. I can't recommend it highly enough.