Dietary Persuaders Dictate How Much You Eat

Bruce Wansink, a professor of Marketing at Cornell University is engaged in some interesting research- that of determining the hidden cues which determine how much we eat. These so called dietary persuaders can have a huge impact on our eating behavior.

He’s already found that people grab more M&M’s from a bowl with multicolored M&M’s, that people tend to eat less popcorn during light or comic movies, compared to sad or gloomy ones, and that most people don’t really know how they’re feeling when they are eating.

Of course, what you eat can have direct impact on your health, and, also, on your skin.

Researchers like Wansink show that it’s not about counting calories or fat grams, but, instead, about learning what hidden cues we are responding to on the days we overeat.

Wansink estimates that each of us makes more than 200 food decisions per day, most of them without conscious thought.

He believes that a better approach to dieting and nutrition would be to find ways we could easily cut 100-200 calories a day. One way this could be done would be to hide favorite foods and eat from controlled portion containers, rather than jumbo sized bags (which tend to persuade us to eat more.)