Word: wansink
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hand, Fesmire makes a less-than-stellar sales pitch for his own product. “I have no desire to ever try it again” says Fesmire. The kit includes a tube of K-Y Jelly and a latex surgical glove. Cornell professor Brian Wansink, winner of the Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize, studied the effect of rigged, bottomless soup bowls on the human appetite. “We hooked up soup bowls with six quarts of tomato soup,” says Wansink, a food psychologist. According to his study, “the typical person ate around...
...Wansink's knowledge impressed me, until I saw the back of his car, which is covered with empty soda cans and McDonald's cups. Which is even stranger, since Wansink passed the first level of tests to be a professional sommelier and his wife was trained as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu. It's as if after all his studies, Wansink has determined that there's no point in trying to keep all the applesauce off the big plate. In his book, he advocates acknowledging how powerless we are and then taking steps to create a healthier eating environment...
...message out, Wansink conducts some of his lab studies in unscientific, attention-grabbing ways that many of his academic peers find showboaty. Some dismiss his work as "Happy Meal studies." Wansink counters that his approach hits people where they live--and eat. "Once you're in a bar giving people chicken wings, people say, 'Oh, I can relate to that,'" he says, referring to an experiment in which he showed that subjects watching the Super Bowl at a bar ate 28% more chicken wings when the waitresses cleared the bones from the table than when the bones piled up. "That...
About a third of the time, Wansink's experiments produce results that surprise even him, as happened with a study on students who buy lunch with debit cards instead of cash--a system many schools are starting to use to take the stigma out of government-aided school-lunch programs. Wansink's team thought the kids would save as much cash as they could for other purchases. "We thought if you have the cash left over, you can spend it on crystal meth or condoms or whatever high school kids buy," he says. Instead, when they had cash, the kids...
Although I love being around him, I find almost all of Wansink's results depressing. Apparently, I'll eat more M&Ms if they're in 10 colors rather than seven because I'll crave the variety. And unless I'm a real foodie, or French, flowers at my table will make me eat more, even though they clash with the smells of my meal, making it less appealing. Maybe I should just give up and gnaw on soy bars all day. But Wansink doesn't see it that way. He figures there are plenty of meals where...