SURFNETKIDS GROWN-UP NONFICTION BOOK CLUB Got shopping? Get discounts! Visit Surfnetkids: Coupons, Deals and Bargains for hundreds of discounts from dozens of online stores. week's book: MINDLESS EATING by Brian Wansink, Ph.D. *New to the book club? Just click on the Missing Read link below for any shops you may have missed. Go to: (Today's book starts after the "Dear Reader" column.) Reader, There's a little miracle I perform every time I'm getting ready to go out of town on business and I wish I could figure out how to do it every day. I'm not a huge fan of business trips, but one of the things I've learned from them is how to focus. I start out with a long list of things that "absolutely" must get done before I leave. But then at some point in the process my focus shifts, and I let go of anything that doesn't concern my trip. It's a wonderful feeling to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time, to give it my all and then move on and repeat the process. When I'm out of town and those "other" things creep into my mind, I simply remind myself that I can't get distracted. I can only concentrate on my next appointment, I need to give it my all and so that's what I do. It's good advice and I listen to it when I'm out of town, but it's been frustrating because I can't seem to perform the magic when I get back home into my daily routine--I get easily distracted. Yesterday when I was working and Abby, my cat, jumped up on my lap I stopped to pet her and her purring was so comforting. And later in the afternoon, when my daughter called to tell me that my granddaughter was most improved in her class, I felt very proud. Okay, so maybe I do get a little distracted when I'm working at home, but you know what? I've decided that's okay. Because yesterday's distractions felt like little miracles to me. Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends. Suzanne Beecher AUTHORBUZZ: With so many new books out every week, we promise these are five that deserve your attention: Joanne Proulx, "Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet;" Christine Fletcher, "Ten Cents a Dance;" Michael Stanley, "A Carrion Death;" Jennifer Cody Epstein, "The Painter from Shanghai;" and Nicole Jordan, "To Seduce a Bride." Go to: Surfing the Net with Kids: shop me: Missing an shop? Go to: =====TODAY'S EATING Why We Eat More then We Think by Brian Wansink, Ph.D. (nonfiction) A Bantam Book Published by Bantam Dell ISBN: 9780553384482 Copyright (c) 2006 By Brian Wansink To reference this shop: MINDLESS (Part 4 of 5) from Wednesday) Traditional diet books focus on what dieticians and health practioners know. This book focuses on what psychologists and marketers know. There are no recipes--only scientifically based findings. Marketers already know some of what you will read, and they use it relentlessly so that you buy their hamburger instead of their competitors'. But this is not an evil conspiracy. Some of the tactics they use are the same ones your grandmother used to make sure you had a great Thanksgiving dinner, and they are ones you can use to make your next dinner party a success. Traditional diet books lead most people to throw up their hands in frustration and deprivation and to buy another diet book that might promise a less painful way to lose weight. Instead, this book shows you how to return the cues that cause you to overeat and how to reengineer your kitchen and your habits. You won't be a swimsuit model or a Chippendale dancer next week, but you "will" be back on course and moving in the right direction. You can eat too much without knowing it, but you can also eat less without knowing it. The best diet is the one you don't know you're on. Let's begin. CHAPTER ONE The Mindless Margin Did you ever eat the last piece of crusty, dried-out chocolate cake even though it tasted like cardboard? Ever finish eating a bag of french fries even though they were cold, limp, and soggy? It hurts to answer questions like these. Why do we overeat food that doesn't even taste good? We overeat because there are signals and cues around us that tell us to eat. It's simply not in our nature to pause after every bite and contemplate whether we're full. As we eat, we unknowingly-- for signals or cues that we've had enough. For instance, if there's nothing remaining on the table, that's a cue that it's time to stop. If everyone else has left the table, turned off the lights, and we're sitting alone in the dark, that's another cue. For many of us, as long as there are still a few milk-soaked Froot Loops left in the bottom of the cereal bowl, there is still work to be done. It doesn't matter if we're full, and it doesn't matter if we don't even really like Froot Loops. We eat as if it is our mission to finish them. Stale Popcorn and Frail Willpower Take movie popcorn, for instance. There is no "right" amount of popcorn to eat during a movie. There are no rules of thumb or FDA guidelines. People eat however much they want depending on how hungry they are and how good it tastes. At least that's what they say. My graduate students and I think different. We think that the cues around us--like the size of a popcorn bucket--can provide subtle but powerful suggestions about how much one should eat. These cues can short-circuit a person's hunger and taste signals, leading them to eat even if they're not hungry and even if the food doesn't taste very good. If you were living in Chicago a few years back, you might have been our guest at a suburban theater matinee. If you lined up to see the 1:05 P.M. Saturday showing of Mel Gibson's new action movie, "Payback," you would have had a surprise waiting for you: a free bucket of popcorn. Every person who bought a ticket--even though many of them had just eaten lunch--was given a soft drink and either a medium-size bucket of popcorn or a large-size, bucket. They were told that the popcorn and soft drinks were free and that we hoped they would be willing to answer a few concession stand-related questions after the movie. There was only one catch. This wasn't fresh popcorn. Unknown to the moviegoers and even to my graduate students, this popcorn had been popped five days earlier and stored in sterile conditions until it was stale enough to squeak when it was eaten. To make sure it was kept separate from the rest of the theater popcorn, it was transported to the theater in bright yellow garbage bags--the color yellow that screams "Biohazard." The popcorn was safe to eat, but it was stale enough one movie-goer said it was like eating Styrofoam packing peanuts. Two others, forgetting they had been given it for free, asked for their money back. During the movie, people would eat a couple bites, put the bucket down, pick it up again a few minutes later and have a couple more bites, put it back down, and continue. It might not have been good enough to eat all at once, but they couldn't leave it alone. Both popcorn and large--had been selected to be big enough that nobody could finish all the popcorn. And each person was given his or her own individual bucket so there would be no sharing. As soon as the movie ended and the credits began to roll, we asked everyone to take their popcorn with them. We gave them a half-page survey (on bright paper) that asked whether they agreed to statements like "I ate too much popcorn," by circling a number from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree). As they did this, we weighed their remaining popcorn. When the people who had been given the large buckets handed their leftover popcorn to us, we said, "Some people tonight were given medium-size buckets of popcorn, and others, like yourself, were given these large-size buckets. We have found that the average person who is given a large-size container eats more than if they are given a medium-size container. Do you think you ate more because you had the large size?" Most disagreed. Many smugly said, "That wouldn't happen to me," "Things like that don't trick me," or "I'm pretty good at knowing when I'm full." That may be what they believed, but it is not what happened. Weighing the buckets told us that the big-bucket group ate an average of 173 more calories of popcorn. That is roughly the equivalent of 21 more dips into the bucket. Clearly the quality of food is not what led them to eat. Once these moviegoers started in on their bucket, the taste of the popcorn didn't matter. Even though some of them had just had lunch, people who were given the big buckets ate an average of 53 percent more than those given medium-size buckets. Give them a lot, and they eat a lot. "And this was five-day-old, stale popcorn!" We've run other popcorn studies, and the results were always the same, however we tweaked the details. It didn't matter if our moviegoers were in Pennsylvania, Illinois, or Iowa, and it didn't matter what kind of movie was showing; all of our popcorn studies led to the same conclusion. People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period. It doesn't matter whether the popcorn is fresh or fourteen days old, or whether they were hungry or full when they sat down for the movie. Did people eat because they liked the popcorn? No. Did they eat because they were hungry? No. They ate because of all the cues around them--not only the size of the popcorn bucket, but also other factors I'll discuss later, such as the distracting movie, the sound of people eating popcorn around them, and the eating scripts we take to movie theaters with us. All of these were cues that signaled it was okay to keep on eating and eating. Does this mean we can avoid mindless eating simply by replacing large bowls with smaller bowls? That's one piece of the puzzle, but there are a lot more cues that can be engineered out of our lives. As you will see, these hidden persuaders can even take the form of a tasty description on a menu or a classy name on a wine bottle. Simply "thinking" that a meal will taste good can lead you to eat more. You won't even know it happened. (continued on Friday) =========BUY this link to get the best price on this week's book: To locate or purchase OTHER BOOKS use this link: =======SHARE THE can forward this shop to your friends and relatives. Encourage them to join our book clubs. It's a great way to stay in touch even if you live thousands of miles apart. comments or book suggestions? Contact me, Barbara J. Feldman, at: Inc., 991C Lomas Santa Fe Dr. #415 Solana Beach, CA 92075 You are currently Purchased to surfgrownup as: To Purchase send a blank shop to To join any of the free Surfnetkids Book Clubs, visit:

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