Ever wonder why your spouse eats too much even when you warn him or her not to eat too much? It could be because your admonitions put your spouse into a state of reactance, causing them to go against your advice just to prove their independence. Reactance is a state of mind that arises when…
Lots of us eat when we are stressed. But did you know that even when we are not currently under stress, the amount of food we eat might be influenced by the stress we experienced as children? That’s the conclusion Sarah Hill, a psychologist at TCU, wants us to draw from several studies she ran…
Put our brains into the modern food environment, and you have a recipe for disaster. Our brains are hardwired to crave calorie-dense foods, this craving no doubt arising from our evolutionary time spent on the Tundra where calories were often scarce. But our modern food environment surrounds us with calorie-dense foods, forcing us to deplete…
Here is a great graphic from the Center for Science in the Public Interest laying out how supermarkets lay out food to encourage impulse purchases: So much for “free” markets!
I have absolutely no confidence that this approach will work, but I don’t even care because it is so hilarious. Thanks to Pelle Hansen (@Peguha) for tweeting this image.
I blog frequently about obesity. I think the most important thing we can do, as a nation, to combat obesity is to try to prevent our next generation of children from becoming obese. Once people become obese, almost no diet in the world will consistently help them lose weight and maintain that weight loss. But…
I recognize that correlation does not prove causation. But here is a picture illustrating the correlation between income inequality and the percent of a country’s population that is obese. The findings are provocative, to say the least. Making the relationship somewhat plausible is all the evidence we have now of the toll that income inequality…
Pizza is pizza, and a full stomach is a full stomach. But when restaurants slice pizza into smaller pieces, you are probably likely to consume less pizza:
ICYMI: When people watch action movies, they consume more calories.