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[[File:BRIAN435S6556 copy.jpg|thumb|Brian Wansink]]
{{Infobox scientist
{{Infobox scientist
|name = Brian Wansink
|name = Brian Wansink

Revision as of 16:58, 26 January 2018

Brian Wansink
Brian Wansink
Born (1960-06-28) June 28, 1960 (age 64)
Sioux City, Iowa
Known forFood behavior and psychology
AwardsIg Nobel Prize (2007)
Scientific career
Fieldsconsumer behavior, nutritional science
InstitutionsUSDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Food and Brand Lab, Cornell University

Brian Wansink (born June 28, 1960) is an American professor in the fields of consumer behavior and nutritional science. He is the former executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) (2007–2009)[1] and now holds the John S. Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University, where he is director of the Food and Brand Lab.[2]

Wansink is best known for his work on consumer behavior and food marketing and for popularizing terms such as "mindless eating" and "health halos." He is the author of over 100 academic articles and books, including the books Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2007) and Slim by Design (2014). He received the 2007 humorous Ig Nobel Prize[3] for his Bottomless Bowls Study,[4] was named ABC World News Person of the Week on January 4, 2008,[5] and was featured in Fitness Magazine's Fit 50 list in 2008.[6]

In 2017, a number of researchers disputed the validity of research from the Food and Brand Lab, finding errors in several papers authored by Wansink.[7][8] In response, Wansink posted a statement, and pledged to release data and code for all the studies in question, as well as develop stricter lab procedures.[9][10][11][8] In October 2017, one prestigious medical journal retracted an article authored by Wansink which purported to show that putting Elmo stickers on fruit made children more willing to eat it.[12] In 2017, Wansink had four studies retracted, in addition to at least eight corrections.[13]

Biography

Wansink was born in Sioux City, Iowa.[14] He received a B.S. from Wayne State College (Nebraska) in 1982 and an M.A. from Drake University in 1984, followed by a Ph.D. in consumer behaviour in 1990 from Stanford University. He was a marketing professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (1990–1994) and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1995–1997), and was a marketing, nutritional science, advertising, and agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1997–2005) before moving to Cornell University (2005 to date).[1]

Wansink founded the Food and Brand Lab in 1997 at the University of Illinois[15] and the Consumer Education Foundation in 1999.[14] In 2005, he moved both to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he founded the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

In 2007, Wansink released the book Mindless Eating. From 2007 to 2009, Wansink took a leave of absence from Cornell to become the executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion,[16] where he oversaw the development of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion#Healthy Eating Index, and the Cost of Raising a Child Index. In 2009, he helped launch the Smarter Lunchroom Movement, a grassroots organization focused on nutrition in school lunches.[17] In 2011, Wansink was elected to a one-year-term as president of the Society for Nutrition Education. In 2014, he released the book Slim by Design and also launched the Global Healthy Weight Registry, which helps to discover how perpetually slim people have avoided gaining weight in an effort to provide potentially useful lessons for the majority of the population.[18]

Research areas

As a consumer behavior researcher, Wansink is best known for his work on food psychology and eating behavior, which focuses on how the environment influences buying and eating food. While some of this research is applicable to food manufacturers and marketers,[19] most is directed at parents, dieters, and at the medical and nutrition community. Using a combination of lab studies and field studies, he has used movie popcorn, refillable soup bowls, bartender glasses, candy dishes, Chinese buffets, and ice cream socials to show how various environment cues influence the food intake of unknowing consumers.[20] Such environmental factors may influence intake by inhibiting consumption monitoring and by suggesting alternative consumption norms.[21]

In contrast to focusing on the macro-food environment as being the cause of the American obesity problem, Wansink's work focuses on the intermediate micro-environment that he contends people can control—their home and their daily habits. In counterpoint to social criticism of the obesigenic nature of our "foodscape," recent work has focused on the more promising changes that can be made in what Wansink refers to as the obesigenic nature of our "kitchenscapes" and "tablescapes."[22]

The studies from the lab inspired the development of100 calorie packs[23] and the Small Plate Movement, as well as quantified a wide range of basic insights:

  • Moving from a 12-inch to a 10-inch dinner plate leads people to serve and eat 22% less.[24]
  • A person will eat an average of 92% of any food they serve themselves.[25]
  • The average person makes in excess of 250 decisions about food each day.[26]
  • Low-fat labels lead people to eat 16-23% more total calories.[27]
  • The Nutritional gatekeeper of a home influences an estimated 72% of all of the food their family eats.[28]
  • Because of visual illusions, people (even professional bartenders) pour 28% more into a short wide glasses than tall ones.[29]
  • 50% of the snack food bought in bulk (such as at a warehouse club store) is eaten within six days of purchase.[30]

In examining the range of what is referred to as "mindless eating," Wansink has made contributions to three principal areas of food-related consumption: consumption norms, taste evaluation, and food selection.

Critique and Response

In January 2017, the validity of research from the Food and Brand Lab was called into question by Jordan Anaya and colleagues, after Wansink had written about asking a graduate student to "salvage" conclusions from a study which had shown null results, subsequently producing five papers from it, all co-authored with Wansink. Anaya and Tim van der Zee and Nicholas J L Brown analysed four of the five papers, and found a total of 150 questionable numbers, such as impossible values and incorrect ANOVA analysis and p-values.[7] According to the critics, requests for access to the original data were denied by Wansink, who cited privacy issues over the anonymity of the participants. Anaya and colleagues later found errors in six other papers from the Food and Brand Lab. New York Magazine described the papers as "shockingly unprofessional" and expressed concern over the journals that published them.[31]

Wansink announced a review of all disputed papers, after locating some of the original datasets,[32] and his intent to take steps to ensure such errors never happened again.[33] On April 5, 2017, Wansink posted an analysis of the alleged errors, and concluded that most of them were the natural results of being field studies (where some participants did not reply to all questions), while some were data or transcription errors. He noted in many cases a single error had been counted multiple times in the critics' reports, when a headline error makes a whole list of numbers seem erroneous, where in fact it was a single error. In addition, Wansink developed and implemented a set of procedures which would prevent these errors from occurring again and conveniently anonymize and catalogue data to be easily shared by request[11][9][10] For a few cases where a paper or chapter was similar in a degree to an earlier work of Wansink, he contacted the journals and asked them to fix it.[11]

Ig Nobel Prize

The Bottomless Bowl Principle

Wansink is a 2007 recipient of the Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition. The Ig Nobel prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prize and are awarded for achievements (or sometimes veiled criticisms thereof) that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Wansink's award was issued for investigating people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup in the Bottomless Bowls Study. It has come to be known as the Bottomless Bowl Principle.[34]

Books

  • Slim by Design (2014), Brian Wansink New York: William Morrow. ISBN 0062136526
  • Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2006), Brian Wansink New York: Bantam-Dell. ISBN 0-553-80434-0.
  • Marketing Nutrition – Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity (2005), Brian Wansink, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-02942-9.
  • Asking Questions: The Definitive Guide to Questionnaire Design – For Market Research, Political Polls, and Social and Health Questionnaires (2004), Norman Bradburn, Seymour Sudman, and Brian Wansink, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 0-7879-7088-3.
  • Consumer Panels (Second Edition) (2002), Seymour Sudman and Brian Wansink, AMA: Chicago, IL. ISBN 0-87757-297-6.

References

  1. ^ a b Wansink, Brian (June 7, 2017). "Wansink Vita" (PDF). Dyson Cornell SC Johnson School of Business.
  2. ^ "About Brian Wansink". June 7, 2017.
  3. ^ "Improbable Research". www.improbable.com. Retrieved 2017-06-07.
  4. ^ Wansink, Brian; Painter, James E.; North, Jill (January 2005). "Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake" (PDF). Obesity Research. 13 (1): 93–100. doi:10.1038/oby.2005.12 – via Wiley Online Library.
  5. ^ "Brian Wansink, 'Nutrition Swami' - ABC News". Abcnews.go.com. 2008-01-04. Retrieved 2010-04-14.
  6. ^ Cuellar, Sandra, ed. (Fall 2008). "Dr. Wansink Named Member of the Fit 50 List" (PDF). The Mindless Eater. Retrieved June 8, 2017.
  7. ^ a b Zee, Tim van der; Anaya, Jordan; Brown, Nicholas J L (25 January 2017). "Statistical heartburn: An attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab". PeerJ Preprints. doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.2748v1. ISSN 2167-9843. Retrieved 15 March 2017.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  8. ^ a b Lee, Stephanie M. "Emails Show How An Ivy League Prof Tried To Do Damage Control For His Bogus Food Science". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 2017-10-19.
  9. ^ a b Authors’ responses to “Statistical heartburn: An attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab”
  10. ^ a b Responses to “Statistical Heartburn: An Attempt to Digest Four Pizza Publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab” A. List of Inconsistencies and Authors’ Responses
  11. ^ a b c "Research Statement April 2017 - Food and Brand Lab".
  12. ^ Carroll, Aaron E. (2017-10-23). "The Cookie Crumbles: A Retracted Study Points to a Larger Truth". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-10-24.
  13. ^ "Food Scientist Brian Wansink Gets Another Retraction". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 2017-11-27.
  14. ^ a b "Brian Wansink Ph.D." HealthCorps. Retrieved 2017-06-08.
  15. ^ "About Us | Food and Brand Lab". foodpsychology.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2017-06-08.
  16. ^ Cuellar, Sandra, ed. (Winter 2008). "Dr. Wansink Goes to Washington" (PDF). The Mindless Eater.
  17. ^ "Smarter lunchroom movement fights childhood obesity". Technology.org. March 31, 2014. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  18. ^ Khazan, Olga. "Skinny People Don't Diet". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  19. ^ Marketing Nutrition – Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity, Champaign (2005), Brian Wansink, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  20. ^ Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2006), Brian Wansink New York: Bantam-Dell.
  21. ^ "Environmental Factors that Increase the Food Intake and Consumption Volume of Unknowing Consumers," (2004) Annual Review of Nutrition, Brian Wansink, Volume 24, 455–479.
  22. ^ “Kitchenscapes, Tablescapes, Platescapes, and Foodscapes: Influences of Microscale Built Environments on Food Intake, Environment and Behavior," (2007) Environment and Behavior, Jeffery Sobal and Brian Wansink, 39:1 (January), 124-42.
  23. ^ Chandon, Pierre; Wansink, Brian (October 2012). "Does food marketing need to make us fat? A review and solutions". Nutrition Reviews. 70 (10): 571–593. doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2012.00518.x – via Wiley.
  24. ^ "The Perils of Plate Size: Waist, Waste, and Wallet (2008), Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum, Journal of Marketing (under advanced review).
  25. ^ "Super Bowls: Serving Bowl Size and Food Consumption," (2005) JAMA – Journal of the American Medical Association, Brian Wansink and Matthew M. Cheney, 293:14 (April 13), 1727–1728.
  26. ^ “Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook,” (2007) Environment and Behavior, Brian Wansink and Jeffrey Sobal, 39:1 (January), 106-23.
  27. ^ "Can Low-Fat Nutrition Labels Lead to Obesity? (2006), Brian Wansink and Pierre Chandon, Journal of Marketing Research 43:4 (November), 605-17..
  28. ^ "Nutritional Gatekeepers and the 72% Solution,” (2006) Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Brian Wansink 106:9 (September), 1324–1327
  29. ^ "Shape of Glass and Amount of Alcohol Poured: Comparative Study of Effect of Practice and Concentration," (2005) BMJ – British Medical Journal, Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum, 331:7531 (December 24) 1512–1514.
  30. ^ "When are Stockpiled Products Consumed Faster? A Convenience-Salience Framework of Post-purchase Consumption Incidence and Quantity," (2002) Journal of Marketing Research, Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink, 39:3 (August), 321–335.
  31. ^ Singal, Jesse (2017-02-08). "A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research". New York magazine. Retrieved 2017-02-20.
  32. ^ http://www.brianwansink.com/home/statistical-heartburn-and-long-term-lessons
  33. ^ "Spoiled Science". 17 March 2017.
  34. ^ "Mindless Eating: Ignobel Prize". 10 February 2010. Archived from the original on 10 February 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
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