What's For Dinner?
The U.S. Government used a Norman Rockwell painting to help explain what we were fighting for in World War II. Rockwell's painting says Thanksgiving like no other, but as Martha Teichner reports, little did anyone know what winning would mean for how we eat.
The number one American meal choice today is the sandwich, according to the annual food industry survey, "Eating Patterns In America." And this is dinner we're talking about, not lunch. The sandwich is followed by chicken, beef and then Italian.
How did over 50,000 survey participants choose what to have for dinner? More than half said convenience. Less than a third said health. It's a pretty sorry statement about dinner, American style.
Brian Wansink has just published "Mindless Eating."
"The convenience of food has a dramatic impact on how fast we eat it and how much we eat. We tend to follow scripted behavior which is eat, eat and eat until we're full," Wansink says. "Our norm, our kind of benchmark — what is an appropriate amount to eat — has just obediently increased with the inexpensiveness and the availability of a lot of good-tasting food."
Wansink is head of the food and brand lab at Cornell University. He looks behind a two-way mirror to conduct an experiment that studies a number of clues that are known to influence people and how much they eat and enjoy food.
In one test, he sees how many seconds it takes somebody to attack a bowl of M&Ms if the television is on.
"People who end up eating their M&Ms end up, usually, taking some within the first ten seconds," Wansink says. "If the TV was not on, the delay gets a lot more extended. The average person is waiting on average 20 seconds, even 25 seconds."
It's enough time to reconsider pigging out. And speaking of M&Ms, the more colors there are to choose from, the more you'll eat.
"What happens is, we eat with our eyes," Wansink says. "We don't eat with our stomach."
Wansink demonstrates how our eyes can deceive us.
"When people pour into a short, wide glass, they end up pouring about 28 percent more than they do in the tall, skinny glass," he says.
And the bigger the bottle, the more we pour — which would help to explain why Americans are consuming 25 percent more calories since 1970 — typically, 2,700 a day.
It's bad enough that we're stuffing ourselves, but it's worse what we're stuffing ourselves with.
"We average more than 140 pounds of sugar and other sweeteners a year," Wansink says.
No wonder a third of the population is now obese.
Lisa Webb lived in a world where supersizing has distorted what we think of as normal.
"A salad out at a restaurant shouldn't be 800 calories, but it is," she said.
Webb has just spent a month at Duke University's famous Diet and Fitness Center, where patients re-learn their eating habits and lifestyle.
Dr. Howard Eisenson is Director of the Duke Center. He says that people — especially overweight people — tend to underestimate the number of calories they're consuming.
"We also tend generally to overestimate the exercise we're getting," he says. "In almost every kind of retail establishment, food is offered. In our version of the gas station, the food consumption experience is almost a bigger part than the purchasing of the gas, so the food is everywhere. It's widely promoted."
The truth is that we eat too much, we eat too fast, we eat on the run and we eat junk. Last year, the average American ate 32 meals in a car, leaving the old fashioned, sit-down family dinner a casualty.
Elizabeth Planet is Director of Special Projects at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, which has tracked the correlation between family dinners and substance abuse for over a decade.
"In our survey, we're finding that about 58 percent of teens say that they're having frequent family dinners," Planet says. "Kids who have frequent family dinners are half as likely to try cigarettes, compared to their peers with infrequent family dinners. They're far less likely to try alcohol, and they're half as likely to report that they get drunk on a monthly basis. They're half as likely to try marijuana. Kids who have frequent family dinners tend to get better grades in school than the kids who have infrequent family dinners."
Why? Because in the end, it's not about the food. It's about the fellowship. And when we look at the Norman Rockwell painting, as sentimental and nostalgic as it is, we long to see ourselves.
