Brian Wansink Quotations

Most of the time, when people talk about comfort foods, we think of things that are really bad for you -- cookies or chips, maybe,

From a party-host perspective, if you don't want people to over-imbibe, try to use the taller, skinnier glasses.

If a person wants to limit how much they consume, it's better if you pour into a tall, skinny glass. If as a host you want to limit what people drink, you better use tall, skinny glasses. You will be less likely to pour too much.

It isn't just the food, either. People might say that chocolate chip cookies are good, but they have to be freshly baked cookies.

You don't drop 2 pounds in two days. You don't see your cholesterol cut in half,

The best diet is the one you don't know you're on.

Interestingly, however, we found that participants consistently underestimated their intake of the candies on their desks yet overestimated how much they ate when the candies were farther away.

If you want to be skinny do what skinny people do.

We're finding that portion size can influence intake as much as taste. Large packages and containers can lead to overeating foods we do not even find appealing.

People generally estimate tall glasses as holding more liquid than wide ones of the same volume. They also focus their pouring attention on the height of the liquid they are pouring and insufficiently compensate for its width.

People say, 'Oh, the bartender knows what he's doing.' Well, the bartender does know what he's doing in a lot of cases, but he falls victim to these illusions.

Yet, people who pour into short, wide glasses consistently believe that they pour less than those who pour into tall, narrow glasses.

Not surprisingly, the participants ate fewer candies when the Kisses were in opaque rather than clear candy jars on their desks and even fewer when the opaque jars were six feet away from their desks. The less visible and less convenient the candy, the less people thought about it and were tempted.

Also, with men, there's a preference toward comfort food that's a little more healthy, like meat, pasta and potatoes. Women choose things like chips, cookies, chocolate and cake.

For an individual consumer, the money and effort spent purchasing these products is not trivial ? as many as 12 percent of purchased products are never used and eventually discarded. By understanding why we buy products we never use, we can change our purchase and usage habits to reduce product abandonment, thereby saving money and reducing waste,

This means that the moviegoers were unaware that the exceptional amount they ate was due to the size of the container.

There were three stages to the research. We did in-depth interviews with about 80 people or so, sent out a questionnaire to about 400 people, and then did a large-scale phone survey of more than 1,000 people.

It was basically an 'out of sight, out of mind' demonstration. The less visible and less convenient the candy, the less people thought about it and were tempted.

It wasn't inconvenience that was restricting how much they consumed those six feet away. It was that it gave them a chance to ask themselves if they were really hungry.