Brian Wansink (born 1960, Sioux City, Iowa) is an American professor in the fields of consumer behavior and nutritional science. He is a former Executive Director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) (2007—2009).
Wansink is best known for his work on consumer behavior and food and for popularizing terms such as "mindless eating" and "health halos." His research has focused on how our immediate environment (supermarkets, packaging, homes, pantries, and tablescapes) influences eating habits and preferences. Wansink holds the John S. Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University. He is the author of over 100 academic articles and books, including the best-selling book Why We Eat More Than We Think and Marketing Nutrition (2005) . He is a 2007 recipient of the humorous Ig Nobel Prize and was named ABC World News Person of the Week on January 4, 2008.
Having been referred to as the "Sherlock Holmes of Food" and the "Wizard of Why", Wansink and his Food and Brand Lab have been credited with improving the deeper scientific understanding of food eating and food shopping. A fundamental finding is that our environment...such as the way a food is labeled, presented, stored, or served...biases our eating habits and taste preferences. A large part of eating less and eating better, he argues, involves making small changes to our homes and to the daily "mindless" patterns of our lives. In underscoring this, the first and last sentence of his book, Mindless Eating states, "The best diet is the one you don't know you're on."
The studies from the lab have been credited with the development of the 100 calorie packs and the Small Plate Movement, as well as discovering and quantifying a wide range of basic, every day insights:
Moving from a 12-inch to a 10-inch dinner plate leads people to serve and eat 22% less.
A person will eat an average of 92% of any food they serve themselves.
The average person makes an excess of 250 decisions about food each day.
Low-fat labels lead people to eat 16-23% more total calories.
The Nutritional Gatekeeper of a home influences an estimated 72% of all of the food their family eats.
Because of visual illusions, people (even Philly bartenders) pour 28% more into a short wide glasses than tall ones.
50% of the snack food bought in bulk (such as at a warehouse club store) is eaten within six days of purchase.
Wansink was born in Sioux City, Iowa of Dutch heritage, to John, a bakery production worker, and to Naomi, a legal secretary. He received his Ph.D. in Consumer behaviour in 1990 from Stanford University, following a B.S. from Wayne State College (Nebraska) in 1982 and an M.A. from Drake University in 1984.
He was a Marketing Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (1990—1994) and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1995—1997), and he was a Marketing, Nutritional Science, Advertising, and Agricultural Economics Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1997—2005) before moving to Cornell University (2005 to date). Wansink has also been a Visiting Professor at the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam) and Insead (Fountainbleau, France), and he was a Visiting Research Scientist at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center (Natick, MA) where he helped design ways to improve the acceptability and consumption of MREs (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) for the United States Army.
Wansink founded the Food and Brand Lab[1] in 1997 at the University of Illinois and the Consumer Education Foundation in 1999. In 2005 he moved both to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Since 2006, Wansink has written a monthly column on food behavior for MSNBC entitled Chew on This. In July 2007, Wansink joined Prevention.com as one of their two nutrition columnists, writing the column Food Think with Wansink.
From 2007-2009, Wansink was granted a leave of absence from Cornell to accept a White House appointment as the fourth Executive Director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP). At CNPP, he oversaw the development of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, the Healthy Eating Index, the Cost of Raising a Child Index, and he is charged with promoting the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, in the form of MyPyramid. He served with the Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, Nancy Montanez Johner.
A consumer psychologist, Wansink is best known for his work on food psychology and eating behavior. This work focuses on how the environment leads or even tricks people into buying and eating food in ways they are unaware. While some of these insights are directed toward responsible food manufacturers and marketers, the majority are focused specifically at parents, dieters, and at the medical and nutrition community. Using a combination of lab studies and field studies, he has used movie popcorn, refillable soup bowls, bartender glasses, candy dishes, Chinese buffets, and ice cream socials to show how various environment cues influence the food intake of unknowing consumers. Although such environmental factors appear unrelated, they generally influence intake by inhibiting consumption monitoring and by suggesting alternative consumption norms.
In contrast to focusing on the macro-food environment as being the cause of the American obesity problem, Wansink's work focuses on the intermediate micro-environment that he contends people can control...their home and their daily habits. In counterpoint to social criticism of the obesigenic nature of our "foodscape," recent work has focused on the more promising changes that can be made in what Wansink refers to as the obesigenic nature of our "kitchenscapes" and "tablescapes."
In examining the wider range of what is referred to as "mindless eating," Wansink has made contributions to three principal areas of food-related consumption: consumption norms, taste evaluation, and food selection.
Consumption Norms
Consumption norms are influenced by the wide range of factors that can bias an unknowing person to eat or drink more than they otherwise would. For instance, the size of a serving bowl, a plate, or a package has repeatedly been shown to bias how much a person serves himself and eats by an average of 20-30%. In addition, the perceived variety (color of candies) in an assortment and the proximity of candy on one’s desk has been shown to double how much a person eats over the course of a day. Because people are estimated to make over 200 food-related decisions a day that they are unaware of making, the seemingly inconsequential impact of lighting, plate size, glass shape, music, companion, table arrangement, and dining companion can have a sizable impact on daily food intake. Over the course of year, even a 200 calorie daily change in how much one eats would translate into a 20 pound loss in weight or a 20 pound gain in weight.
Taste Evaluation
The extent to which people enjoy food can be influenced by subtle environmental cues. The names of a food can create either positive or negative predispositions that can unfairly bias a person's perceived taste of a food. Wansink shows this is one reason why advertising or promoting a food as "healthy" unfairly biases people against the taste of a food. Yet using names and visual cues to guide a person's expectations can also enhance their perceived taste of a food. In one study, simply labeling a food as being a Succulent Italian Seafood Filet lead restaurant goers to much more favorably rate the taste than when it was simply labeled Seafood Filet. Similarly, the elegance of dishes and the garnishes on plates has been shown to influence a person’s taste ratings of a food.
Food Selection
The food a person eats at a given time is related to sensory issues, but it is also related to how appropriate they perceive this food for that situation. People are more likely to adopt a food into a new situation (say, eating soup for breakfast) if they focus on the benefits of the food instead of on how it differs from prototypical breakfast foods. Food selection has also been linked to favorable past memories of food. This has been suggested as to why men tend to claim their favorite comfort foods are meal-related foods, such as steak, pasta, and soup, while women prefer the more convenient foods, such as ice cream, chocolate, and cookies. For men, meal-related comfort foods evoke feelings of nurturing and attention. Yet for women they evoke memories of preparation and clean-up.
Brian Wansink is a 2007 recipient of the Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition. The Ig Nobel prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prize and are awarded for achievements (or sometimes veiled criticisms thereof) that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Wansink's award was issued for investigating people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup. It has come to be known as the Bottomless Bowl Principle.
Why We Eat More Than We Think (2007), Brian Wansink New York: Bantam-Dell. ISBN 0-553-84481-0.
Why We Eat More Than We Think (2006), Brian Wansink New York: Bantam-Dell. ISBN 0-553-80434-0.
Marketing Nutrition — Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity (2005), Brian Wansink, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-02942-9.
Asking Questions: The Definitive Guide to Questionnaire Design — For Market Research, Political Polls, and Social and Health Questionnaires (2004), Norman Bradburn, Seymour Sudman, and Brian Wansink, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 0-7879-7088-3.
Consumer Panels (Second Edition) (2002), Seymour Sudman and Brian Wansink, AMA: Chicago, IL. ISBN 0-87757-297-6.
“Environmental Factors that Increase the Food Intake and Consumption Volume of Unknowing Consumers,” (2004) Annual Review of Nutrition, Brian Wansink Volume 24, 455-479.
"Super Bowls: Serving Bowl Size and Food Consumption," (2005) JAMA — Journal of the American Medical Association, Brian Wansink and Matthew M. Cheney, 293:14 (April 13), 1727—1728.
“De-Marketing Obesity,” (2005) California Management Review, Brian Wansink and Mike Huckabee, 47:4 (Summer), 6-18.
“Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake,” (2005) Obesity Research, Brian Wansink, James E. Painter, and Jill North,13:1 (January), 93-100.
"Shape of Glass and Amount of Alcohol Poured: Comparative Study of Effect of Practice and Concentration," (2005) BMJ — British Medical Journal, Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum, 331:7531 (December 24).
"Can "Low-Fat" Nutrition Labels Lead to Obesity?," (2006) Journal of Marketing Research, Brian Wansink and Pierre Chandon, 43:4 (November), 605-17.
“Meal Size, Not Body Size, Explains Errors in Estimating the Calorie Content of Meals,” (2006) Annals of Internal Medicine, Brian Wansink and Pierre Chandon, 145:5 (September 5), 326-32.
"Nutritional Gatekeepers and the 72% Solution,” (2006) Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Brian Wansink 106:9 (September), 1324—1327
“Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook,” (2007) Environment and Behavior, Brian Wansink and Jeffrey Sobal, 39:1 (January), 106-23.
“Portion Size Me: Downsizing Our Consumption Norms,” (2007) Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum, 107:7 (July), 1103-1106.
"Is Obesity Caused by Calorie Underestimation? A Psychophysical Model of Fast-Food Meal Size Estimation," (2007) Journal of Marketing Research, Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink 44:1 (February), 84-99.
"The Biasing Health Halos of Fast Food Restaurant Health Claims: Lower Calorie Estimates and Higher Side-Dish Consumption Intentions," (2007) Journal of Consumer Research, Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink 34:3 (October) 301-314.
“Internal and External Cues of Meal Cessation: The French Paradox Redux? (2007) Obesity, Brian Wansink, Collin Payne, and Pierre Chandon, 15 (December), 2920-2924. .
