Quotes from Brian Wansink

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

There's only one thing that's strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit.

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

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.

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

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.

the idea of eating better is do-able. While eating right is a long-term goal, eating better is something we can start today.

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.

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

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.

Even though I was appointed by the White House to be executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's agency in charge of the 2010 United States Dietary Guidelines, and even though I am a past president of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, I still don't think most nutrition education is very effective. People know that an apple is better for them than a Snickers bar, but . . . they eat the Snickers bar anyway.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Secretaries who had been given candies in clear desktop dishes were caught with their hands in the candy dish 71 percent more often (7.7 versus 4.6 times) as those given white dishes. Every day that dish was on their desk they ate 77 more calories. Over a year, that candy dish would have added over five pounds of extra weight. What is a little bit scary is that none of them would have probably known where those pounds came from.

It Isn't nutrition until it's eaten.

While eating right is a long-term goal, eating better is something we can start today. Eating better entails small steps.

There's only one thing that's strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit.

But the real concern is with obese people. They typically underestimate how much they eat by 30 to 40 percent. Some think they eat half as much as they actually do.14

Moods, however, do seem to influence what we choose to eat. People in happy moods tended to prefer healthier foods, such as pizza or steak. People in sad moods were much more likely to reach for ice cream, cookies, or a bag of potato chips.2