This fast-food-loving, organics-hating Ivy League prof will trick you into eating better

His No. 1 tip: It’s not about the food — it’s about your surroundings.

T he Chicken Quesadilla Grande is calling to me. I am jet-lagged, starving, and fairly certain that a giant pile of melted cheese will dramatically improve my outlook on life. But right now, in front of a renowned authority on healthy eating? That doesn’t seem like such a great idea.

Brian Wansink Photos by Tristan Spinski/GRAIN Images

I’m here at an Applebee’s in Ithaca, New York, where Brian Wansink, a Cornell food psychologist, is evaluating my dining habits. So far, he says, I’ve got a few things going for me: We are seated by the window, which his research has shown makes us 80 percent more likely to order salad. And had we chosen a booth near the bar, our risk of ordering dessert would have been 73 percent greater. I should be glad, he says, that the ceiling lamps are casting a cheery glow and that Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” is playing softly; dim lighting and loud music are associated with consuming a lot of calories, not to mention lower satisfaction with the meal.

Maybe it’s thanks to the felicitous environment that, when the waitress arrives, I dutifully order the strawberry-and-avocado salad with grilled chicken. Then it’s Wansink’s turn. “I’ll have the bacon-and-ranch wedge salad,” he says. “Then the French onion soup and the cheeseburger sliders. And a Diet Coke.”

He seems pleased with himself. “I ordered basic comfort food,” he offers cheerfully. “You ordered a little funkier.” I try not to scowl. “If you tell people to be mindful of what they order, they don’t like it as much and they make up for it later,” he explains. “They tell themselves they deserve ice cream since they virtuously ate a salad for dinner.”

Great, I think, as I pick through bagged lettuce topped with rubbery chicken, a few mealy strawberries, and a cluster of stiff avocado slices. Across the table, Wansink is digging into his soup, wrapping long strings of melted Swiss around the spoon. By the time his sliders arrive, he’s so full he can only finish one. He has the waitress pack the other two to go.

Wansink runs Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, devoted to studying how our physical surroundings — everything from supermarket layout to food packaging to the color of your kitchen walls — affect what and how we eat. The lab, which he founded at the University of Illinois in 1997 and moved to Cornell in 2005, draws funding from government agencies and industry trade groups. It houses two full-time faculty members, six to eight staffers, and 15 or so grad students, postdocs, and visiting scholars from such varied fields as food science, agriculture, economics, marketing, and psychology.

Nestled in a stately building on the campus of Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the lab occupies a suite of offices and classrooms, plus what at first glance looks like an unremarkable seminar space: large rectangular table, white board, sleep-deprived grad students. But on experiment days, out come the tablecloths, dishes, and cutlery. Researchers configure furniture to resemble a restaurant or a home dining room and use hidden cameras and two-way mirrors to document their subjects’ actions.

After our lunch, I watch Wansink teach a graduate seminar on eating behavior. The students take turns reporting on their progress. A wiry postdoc named John is trying to figure out why people who indulge in novelty items like deep-fried Snickers bars at the state fair are thinner than those who opt for more conventional fare, like hamburgers. A slim, bespectacled Ph.D. candidate is using two versions of a clip from the movie Harold to study satiety. She has found that students who view a clip in which the characters finish their meal eat a little less afterward than those shown a version that ends with a meal in progress. Aner, a stocky Israeli researcher, plans to study whether shoppers who chew minty gum make healthier supermarket choices. When Wansink hears something he likes, he thumps the table and proclaims, “That is really cool data.”

“There are a million nutritionists out there that tell you to eat an apple instead of a Snickers bar,” says Wansink. “I want to meet people where they’re at.”

Wansink is 54 and has a Nordic look about him — tall, with wispy blond hair, white eyelashes, and light-blue eyes. He’s perpetually animated, often literally yelping with delight. He grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where his father worked at a commercial bakery, loading muffins onto a conveyor belt. As a teen, he became fascinated with the life of Herbert Hoover, especially his work on improving food access for Americans. “He kept people from starving,” Wansink says. “I said to myself, ‘If I can ever do a fraction of what he did for food aid, I’ll be the luckiest guy in the world.’”

Wansink is not overweight in the slightest, nor is he remarkably fit. He exercises on occasion and tries “not to eat anything too awful,” but he doesn’t diet. His Taiwanese American wife, Jeryuan, who trained as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu, cooks standard American fare when her husband is home. When he’s out, she makes Chinese food — which he doesn’t like — for herself and their three daughters. Wansink rises at precisely 4:46 a.m. daily and often works past dinnertime. He is astonishingly prolific — he has published 123 studies since 2005, when outlets from Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine to the New York Times covered his findings that people who used smaller plates and tall, thin glasses consumed fewer calories than those using larger plates and short, squat glasses. The thrust of his research directly contradicts the prevailing wisdom in nutrition circles — that the way to improve America’s diet is to teach people about the dangers of trans fats, refined sugar, and white flour. In Wansink’s view, that’s a losing battle — if we were rational eaters, the snack food industry would already be out of business. “There are a million nutritionists out there that tell you to eat an apple instead of a Snickers bar,” he says. “I want to meet people where they’re at.”

Wansink truly burst onto the popular scene with his 2006 book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, which became a New York Times bestseller. You might think of “mindless eating,” he wrote, as inhaling a bag of chips in front of the TV. Instead, look at it as making small tweaks to your habits — using small plates, keeping the cereal in the cupboard instead of on the counter, or starting your grocery shopping in the produce aisle.

If we really want to eat better, Wansink explains, we have to trick our brains into making the right choices. The Food and Brand Lab once counseled a man — random people sometimes call in with questions or problems — who wanted to quit drinking Slurpees every day. The team knew that just telling him to avoid 7-Eleven wouldn’t work. “So we told him that he had to drink it in the parking lot,” Wansink says. “He had to sit there and drink that stupid thing and get brain freeze.” Pretty soon, Slurpee Guy kicked the habit.

As for his personal choices, Wansink considers organic food a waste of money, drinks six diet sodas daily, and takes his kids to McDonald’s after church on Sundays. He rejects the notion of good calories and bad calories — within reason, he believes, what we eat matters less than how much we eat. (Indeed, researchers at the National Institutes of Health recently found that adults placed on balanced diets containing processed carbs from foods like white bread, instant rice, and fruit packed in sweet syrup fared just as well — at least in terms of cardiovascular risk factors — as those who got their carbs from apples, whole grains, and steel-cut oats. But eating fewer carbs and overall calories made a difference.) It’s not like Wansink doesn’t think we should eat our veggies. He’s just realistic about it. “It would be great if we could be mindful eaters,” Wansink says. “But most of us don’t have the luxury of cutting a pea in half, tasting it, and asking ourselves, ‘Are we full yet?’ We have full-time jobs. We get home and the kids are running around. It’s a lot easier for us to set up our most immediate environment so that it’s easier to eat better.”

A lifelong libertarian, he also opposes soda taxes and laws that require fast-food restaurants to post nutritional information. He considers such tactics elitist, and he hates nothing more than elitism. You might think of him as the anti-Alice Waters. When I told him I was hoping to go to the Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca’s renowned temple of vegetarian hippie food, he winced. “The waiters and waitresses there seem really snooty,” he said. “And it is so expensive.” He prefers Taco Bell. “Where else can you feed a family of five for under $10?”