Brian Wansink quotes

If you want to be skinny do what skinny people do.
- Brian Wansink

People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period.
- Brian Wansink

In one study, people who listened to a lunchtime radio mystery show ate 15 percent more than those who didn’t. The basic rule: distractions of all kinds make us eat, forget how much we eat, and extend how long we eat – even when we’re not hungry.
- Brian Wansink

Serving sizes start to make sense only when foods are individually packaged.
- Brian Wansink

Beware of the health halo. The better the food, the worse the extras. People eating ‘low-fat’ granola ate 21 percent more calories, and those eating ‘healthy’ at Subway rewarded themselves by ordering cheese, mayo, chips, and cookies. Who really overeats – the guy who knows he’s eating 710 calories at McDonald’s, or the woman who thinks she’s eating a 350-calorie Subway meal that actually contains 500 calories?
- Brian Wansink

The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.
- Brian Wansink

It’s about as close to an established fact as things get in the social sciences: People who watch a lot of TV are more likely to be overweight than people who don’t.
- Brian Wansink

As long as we believe it is food that causes us to overeat, we are lost. Television, friends, and weather seem pretty unrelated to what we eat. That’s why they have such a powerful effect on us.
- Brian Wansink

We can turn the food in our life from being a temptation or a regret to something we guiltlessly enjoy. We can move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.
- Brian Wansink

Is It Baby Fat or Real Fat? The answer partly depends on the parents. A study of 854 Washington State children under three years old showed that a child is nearly three times as likely to grow up obese if one of his parents is obese. If you’re overweight, your child has a 65–75 percent chance of growing up to be overweight. So, is that little paunch on your fourth grader baby fat? Not if you’re sporting the same paunch.
- Brian Wansink

There’s only one thing that’s strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit.
- Brian Wansink

People were almost twice as likely to reach for a comfort food when they were happy than when they were sad.
- Brian Wansink

In other words, volume trumps calories. We eat the volume we want, not the calories we want.
- Brian Wansink

If a wave of veganism washed over the land, in six months there would be Broccoli Kings, Taco Bell Peppers, and McTofu Drive-Thrus.
- Brian Wansink

Just as we can’t tell how much we’ve eaten simply by relying on internal cues, we can’t really tell how much we’ve gained or lost without some external benchmark.
- Brian Wansink

Yet the heavier a person was – American or French – the more they relied on external cues to tell them when to stop eating and the less they relied on whether they felt full.13.
- Brian Wansink

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

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.
- Brian Wansink

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

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.
- Brian Wansink