Ezra Klein asked Dan Ariely for Thanksgiving advice:
"Move to chopsticks!" he exclaimed, making bites smaller and harder to take. If the chopsticks are a bit extreme, smaller plates and utensils might work the same way. Study after study shows that people eat more when they have more in front of them. It's one of our predictable irrationalities: We judge portions by how much is left rather than how full we feel. Smaller portions lead us to eat less, even if we can refill the plate.
Speaking of which, Ariely suggests placing the food "far away." In this case, serve from the kitchen rather than the table. If people have to get up to add another scoop of mashed potatoes, they're less likely to take their fifth serving than if they simply have to reach in front of them.
"Start with a soup course," he says. That is what economists refer to as a default: Rather than putting everything on the table for people to choose, you begin by making the choice for your guests. If the first course is relatively filling and relatively low in calories, everyone will eat less during the rest of the meal.
Indeed, it's not a bad idea to limit the total number of courses. Variety stimulates appetite. As evidence, Ariely brings up a study conducted on mice. A male mouse and a female mouse will soon tire of mating with each other. But put new partners into the cage, and it turns out they weren't tired at all. They were just bored. So, too, with food. "Imagine you only had one dish," he says. "How much could you eat?"
What you eat, of course, is also important. Studies show that people aren't very consistent in the amount of calories they eat each day, but they're very consistent in the volume of food they eat each day. Thanksgiving is an exception to that consistency, but probably not to the underlying rule. Satisfaction doesn't depend on caloric intake; low-calorie, high-fiber foods and foods high in water content are filling. Thus, the more broccoli rabe there is at the table, the better.
But the whole point is to eat too much.
This is good advice for everyday eating, but not for Thanksgiving, when you throw all the rules out the window.
Many of these ideas and more can be found in Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink, who won the coveted 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for his research on the surprisingly simple factors that contribute to overeating.
Wow, I can’t help but think Ariely has missed the boat entirely. Sheesh… People eat “too much” (to him or Ezra) because they want to!
To “correct” what is not a problem, he recommends:
* Make it more difficult to eat (chopsticks, etc.)
* Make it more costly to get seconds (serve from the kitchen)
* Make the meal less enjoyable (fewer courses, less variety)
I am surprised he does not recommend having us sign disclaimers with every bite — “I understand that this has X calories and consuming it now may adversely affect my health in A, B, and C ways” — or sing some silly jingle — “I’m getting fatter, after all…” — while eating.
Why not just go all the way and just serve beans and white rice? This will be about as boring as the mouse sex with very low calories per volume. I heartily recommend he and Ezra make the switch. I choose to enjoy my Thanksgiving meal, thank you.
My advice is to enjoy people’s company without badgering them or BF Skinnering them.
Also, eating a whole lot on Thanksgiving isn’t going to make you fat. People get fat from eating too much on a daily basis, not from eating too much once in a great while.
Agnostic,
Diets based on smaller portions and lower caloric density do work and do lead to weight loss and improved health. As with most nutritional research, evidence is mixed, but the best evidence we have indicates that increasing your protein and fat intake leads to increased rates of heart disease and cancer.
It is tricky to say what the “best” diet is, but as far as getting your calories I would stick with unsaturated fats, whole grains/low glycemic index carbs, and a modest amount of protein, perhaps 20-25% of your calories, primarily from non-animal sources. Of course vegetables have very little of anything but nutrients (low calories, low carb, low fat), so those should be the staple of your diet.
Lower calories with high nutritional value will lead to weight loss and VASTLY improved health outcomes. Lower your calories enough while maintaining nutrition and you practically eliminate the health epidemics of our age, including heart disease and many cancers.
The way to achieve lower caloric intake is to eat low caloric density foods (high nutritional density). Try limiting yourself to vegetables- you will not be able to eat enough to avoid losing weight (not that vegetables-only is an optimal diet).
It’s good advice, just maybe not for Thanksgiving holistically. The advice for Thanksgiving might be to have a fasting tradition to counterbalance it, and I’m not talking about a light breakfast the day of.
In the US we sacrifice health for our productivity on a daily basis and I’m chagrined by the lack of acknowledgement for all positive externalities we throw off (does the world really want another Europe?). For example, our universities are filled with foreigners. We trade with just about anyone with a heartbeat and all you have to do is keep your own crappy governments in check, something we obviously can’t help you with. And yet, we are constantly harangued for being a “rich” country that refuses to share our lucky fortunes with others.
Then again, if I were to get serious about it I’d probably wonder why I didn’t have a more formal fasting and feast tradition based on religion.
Is it some anti-religion conspiracy? But, then I’d probably come to the notion that Thanksgiving is innocuous enough to anchor non-religious family to a needed traditional get-together. How rational is tradition anyway? Maybe it rational if the best solution to a coordination problem.
I don’t understand why so many people are wowed by Ariely. I thought his book was facile and wrong, and as others have said, he’s clearly missed the point on this issue. He recently said that we shouldn’t be using financial incentives to get people to save the environment, because we “should” love it. Anybody that blithely tosses around such dim-witted normative statements should have their economist licence revoked.
Also, anybody who thinks that chopsticks make you eat slowly is, to be polite, culturally sheltered.
Also, anybody who thinks that chopsticks make you eat slowly is, to be polite, culturally sheltered.
Especially rice!
Do NOT get in the way there.
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