Mindless eating... it's how we eat!

One of the books I relied on for good -- and fascinating -- information for How We Did It was Dr. Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think.

Dr. Wansink is called a "food psychologist." From his lab at Cornell University, he conducts experiments into the factors that lead us to eat what we eat. And you'd think that we eat what we eat because it tastes good, right? Wrong!

In some of his crazy experiments, Dr. Wansink has uncovered the many misguided reasons we eat. Among them are these:

• The size and shape of a bowl can almost double the amount of food you eat.
• Restaurants can get you to eat more by describing their menu items with adjectives.
• You will eat more candy if you throw away the wrappers as you go along than if you let the wrappers pile up.
• If you have bread served with dipping oil rather than with butter, you'll consume less bread but more calories.
  
• Grocery store signs that read 3-for-$3 rather than $1/each can more than double our purchases.

These are just a few of the fascinating facts Dr. Wansink has confirmed with his research. How can you apply this information to your food consumption? "By encouraging healthy, mindful eating, we can decrease obesity," Wansink says. "A keen awareness of all these hidden persuaders is an important step in controlling the amount and quality of food you eat."

For me, "mindful eating" means this:
I will not eat straight from a package. If I want some crackers, I'll put some on a plate.
I will not eat something just because it's there. Most chocolate made in the U.S. tastes like wax. I've stopped eating my son's leftover Halloween candy. If I want chocolate, I'll eat just a little bit of really good chocolate.
I absolutely do not shop when I'm hungry. The temptations are just too overwhelming. I'll have a small, healthy snack before I go, even if I'm in a hurry.
If I eat while watching TV, I choose the snack beforehand and set it out on the coffee table. No trips to the kitchen during a show!

How about you? What does "mindful eating" mean for you?

Boys and their appetites

In my last post, I profiled Daniel Greenlees, a teenager who lost 70 pounds at a gym with the help of a personal trainer. The topic brought up some questions for me: How much do teen boys eat anyway? Should you limit calories or carbs or anything? Or should you just encourage more activity?

I had two sisters, who each had two girls. I had no close male cousins or even an uncle. By having a boy, I broke up the family sorority. So I know nothing about boys and their eating habits. But I hear they're prodigious. Already, I feel like a short-order cook. The eating orgy seems to last from the minute he's home from school to the minute he goes to bed.

As my son approaches puberty, I can see his body changing. He's not a stick on chicken legs any more. But I don't know what's normal. Will he pack on pounds and then stretch out? Should I be concerned about his dimply middle? Or should I just trust that he'll get enough exercise to even it all out in the end? His diet is not the worst it could be, but it's not the best. Should I keep a closer eye on sugars and fats?

Any advice from you who have experience feeding boys would be great. I'm totally in the dark here. My mother says she had -- and lost -- a monumental battle with me and my sisters over breakfast. We refused to eat it apparently. She finally gave in. Should I be worried about my son's habits yet? Or should I just give in and hope for the best?

The Food Police: Failing!

At age 11, my son barely weighs 90 pounds. He's moderately active, plays baseball three seasons of the year, plays outside with friends. So, I figure I'm not doing so bad as the food and exercise police, right?!?

I decided to find out how I stack up as "the nutritional gatekeeper" that author Brian Wansick (Mindless Eating) identifies as the person in charge of family food choices. So I piled the kitchen table high with boxes, bags, bottles and packages. Here is a day's menu:

Breakfast: buttered toast or kids cereal, small handful of peanuts, ½ banana or apple, ½ cup of 1% milk
Lunch: 6 oz. low-fat yogurt or ½ cup sweetened applesauce, snack crackers, 1 pack fruit snacks, bottle of water
Snack: handful of red grapes, or celery stalk with 1 tbsp. peanut butter, toaster tart, ½ cup milk
Dinner: 6 homemade chicken nuggets with 1 tbsp. catsup, ½ cup mashed potatoes with butter, ¼ cup peas
Dessert or snack: 4 Oreos and ½ cup milk or ½ cup ice cream
During baseball season: one 20 oz. sports drink

I picked just one ingredient -- sugar -- to gauge how I was doing. On food labels, ingredients are listed by weight, in grams. Four grams of sugar equals one teaspoon. Counting only the added sugars—that is, not foods’ natural sugars—here’s the total:

Breakfast: 2 ¼ -5 ½ tsps.
Lunch: 8-8 ½ tsps.
Snack: 6 ½ tsp.
Dinner: 1 tsp.
Desserts or snack: 6 ½ tsps.
Sports drink: 8 ¾ tsps.

TOTAL: 23-37 teaspoons

Pretty bad, huh? And Dr. Wansink estimates that parents control only 72 percent of a child’s diet. Add in birthday cupcakes, pizza parties, lunch trades, team celebrations and other splurges, and his total could increase by almost 30 percent. At its worst, that’s about 48 teaspoons a day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says to eat no more than 10 teaspoons of added sugar a day!

I took out a measuring cup. Those 48 teaspoons pile up to more than a cup of sugar. Going from bad to worse, I converted the sugar into calories, 16 calories per teaspoon. The total now? About 770 calories!

Estimate that a child under age 14 should consume 1,000 calories a day, plus 100 calories per year of age. That means my son's diet is about 2,100 calories a day. So, if his daily calorie count approximates this figure, he’s getting about 35 percent of his calories from sugar!

I'm not even talking about the fat and sodium in his diet, which I can see is considerable. It’s clear that we have some work to do before we're nominated for Best Nutritional Gatekeeper!

Obesity and family food choices

I've been to two high school productions recently. One was a musical, the other a choral event. Let me tell you what I noticed. In the musical, of the performers who didn't have lead roles, I'd say about 1 in 4 was overweight. In the choral production, the ratio was even higher -- nine of the 13 singers were overweight and probably five of them would be considered obese. I was shocked.

But maybe that's just the way it is today. Bill Baroni, a well-known New Jersey politician who told me about his 132-pound weight loss, said that when he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, he was the target of cruel comments and hurtful exclusion by other children because he was “the fat kid” in his class. But today, he speculated, kids might not have it so bad.

“Today, you’re not the only fat kid in the class,” he said. “You’re just one of many fat kids.”

In fact, that’s just what health researchers have found. In a 2002 survey, the National Center for Health Statistics calculated that about 17 percent of children over the age of six are overweight or obese—that’s around 13.5 million children. That number has more than doubled in the last few decades. And who knows what’s happened in the years since the survey.

Having a child myself, I don’t want to believe that the blame lies solely with parents. And, in fact, I don’t think it does. Read up on the food industry—Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock or Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser—to come face to face with the powerful corporate forces that are battling us for our children’s health.

But we are not blameless. One Cornell University researcher has quantified just how much responsibility we as parents bear. In his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink examines the influence of the person in the family he calls “the nutritional gatekeeper.” That's the parent who does the menu planning, grocery shopping and cooking. Through extensive studies, Wansink found that this person is responsible for about 72 percent of a family’s food choices.

I was heartened by that number, because it means that in our own house we can control all but 28 percent of the food our child eats. But if I’m honest, I have to admit that the decisions we make aren’t always good. Grilled sausage-and-cheese sandwiches. Donuts. Cheese puffs. Pepperoni pizza. Of our own volition, we abdicate some of our responsibility on a daily basis.

I recently laid out on the kitchen table the typical foods my son eats during an average day. I checked labels, looked up nutritional information online and added up his intake of just one ingredient: sugar. I'll post the results soon.... as soon as I pick myself up off the floor!