Ever wonder who invented the 100-calorie snack pack? It was Cornell University food psychologist Brian Wansink and he's freakin' smart.
And no, smart-ass, he doesn't ask fried chicken to sit on his couch and tell him about their egg-spent youth. He researches human relationships with food. For example...
The cards are stacked against most Americans. Our bodies think we're still hunter-gatherers threatened by imminent famine at the end of every season -- even as we drive the minivan to Costco. Our supermarkets offer tens of thousands of products, often sold in packages that could feed a small nomadic tribe.
"When it comes to portion control, you can count on your brain not being very interested and your body not being very well calibrated," Wansink says. Result: We often overeat in 100-or 200-calorie increments, which over time adds up to a weight gain that seems like a mystery to the eater. And here's the rub, according to Wansink: Most of us know what we're supposed to eat, and how much of it. We just ignore what we know. We eat, he says, "mindlessly."
This is a great profile on the man's work featured on CookingLight.com. He's full of that special kind of screamingly obvious diet advice that you just never seem to come up with on your own. Click through, read, be enlightened, and toss out that handful of M&M you just helped yourself to.
The 100 calorie snack pack concept can only be supported if you believe a calorie is a calorie. Of course that sort of thinking leads to great marketing ideas like this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hostesscakes.com/100/awards/
I understand Hostess wanting to promote their products as healthy (kind of like never ask a barber if you need a haircut), but is Women's Health magazine really doing its readership a service by promoting awards such as this? Seriously? Twinkie Bites can be called a healthy food?
I don't think our hunter-gatherer ancestors ever came across a package of Twinkie Bites in the wild.
I cannot buy 100-calorie snack packs. It's not smart. Those things fill me up about as much as three grapes, and I end up eating four of them at once. So there goes the 100-calorie theory.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know. I don't buy them either, but the point is that the Fitness Nerd Herd are hardly your typical eaters. Those snack packs serve the function of steering people who would normally polish off half a box of Oreos away from morbid obesity.
ReplyDeleteIt's like cow branding. It's kind of lame and horrible, but when you're dealing with cattle, you need to be creative in leading them in at least the general right direction.