A Big Fat Crisis (11 page)

Not only were the students more likely to eat the same snacks as the experimenter, but they also reported liking the snack they ate more than the one they didn’t. They claimed they had always preferred that specific snack, yet when the researchers compared the snack preferences the students had listed three days before with those chosen during the experiment, they did not always match.

In another Duke University study, instead of seeing whether participants unconsciously mimicked the experimenter, the experimenter purposely mimicked the participants and then observed whether mimicking influenced how much the participants ate.
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What they found was astonishing.

The participants were told that the study was about impression formation and how new products might be perceived. The researchers said they were testing a new drink called Vigor and that the participants would get an opportunity to taste and rate the drink at the end of the study. There was a highly scripted interaction in which participants were asked their opinions about drinks and, in particular, sports drinks. For half of the group, the experimenter mimicked the participants, copying their mannerisms such as posture, leg crossing, arm and hand movements, and face and hair touching. In addition, after a question was asked, the experimenter would repeat the participant’s answer verbatim. In contrast, for the other half of the group, the experimenter “anti-mimicked” the participants: if the participant slouched, the experimenter stood straight; if the participant crossed her legs, the experimenter kept both feet on the floor. And instead of repeating participants’ answers verbatim, the experimenter said something like, “OK, I got your views on that one.”

Mimicking made a significant difference in the participants’ preferences and responses to the drink. Not only did they report enjoying the drink more when they were mimicked, they also drank nearly 60 percent more. They also said they would be more likely to buy Vigor
and were more likely to think that the marketing would be successful. Moreover, the participants were completely unaware that they were being mimicked, and of course they had no clue that this could have influenced their rating of the drink or how much they drank.

Mimicry may even play a role in immigrants’ assimilation in their adopted countries. The longer immigrants stay in a new country, the more their health patterns and diseases become like those of their adopted country. If the changes don’t happen in the first generation of immigrants, they most certainly occur in the second generation. For example, when Asians move to America, they typically gain weight and eat differently from their families in places like Japan and China.

As I was growing up, the food served in my house was always plain and bland. My mother never added spices, except sometimes on hot summer days. She thought that salting our food would prevent us from becoming dehydrated in the sun. Until I left home for college, I had never tasted any food that was peppery or pungent.

You can imagine the difficulty I faced when, during college, I spent a year in India, in a city far from the main tourist spots catering to Western tastes. My first experience of Indian food was quite an unpleasant shock. I could not tolerate any of the hot spices, and many of the other flavors seemed strange and disagreeable. The savory pickles seemed foul, and many of the vegetables and curries looked plain nasty. At first, all I could eat were yogurt and rice. But yogurt and rice weren’t going to sustain me for an entire year. So I kept trying the foods in small quantities. Gradually, I learned to appreciate the exotic flavors and hot spices. By the time I left India, I couldn’t remember what had tasted so terrible. I came to like Indian food so much that today I choose it over American food at every opportunity.

I learned to like the food that was available to eat. All people have this ability to one degree or another. Part of this is related to mimicry, in that we sometimes automatically and other times intentionally act to fit in. We adapt—and being able to do so is a matter of survival. We will usually adjust to whatever situation we face, and we will most likely come to satisfactory terms and accommodations, if not actual happiness about it. In fact, for most of us, it may be harder to maintain dissatisfaction
with our circumstances than to gradually adjust and accept them, especially when we believe we have no other choice. We have a natural ability to make the best of our reality. When the conditions around us change, most of us assimilate.

In 1957, Vance Packard wrote
The Hidden Persuaders
, in which he warned of the techniques advertisers were using to create demand for products. He described what seemed to be advertisers’ ability to influence people’s preferences and behaviors in a way that was below their capacity to recognize. At that time, the evidence was anecdotal, and there were no controlled studies that allowed us to identify the magnitude of the impact of marketing techniques on individual behavior. But now there are hundreds of studies that document how simple changes in the design, content, format, and layout of stores, displays, advertisements, packaging, and images make significant differences in how people automatically respond. Those in the food industry, as in other industries, have applied these techniques to their products and sales campaigns. They have increased the frequency and location of messages about food and dramatically altered food accessibility, availability, and variety. Most of the time, we just don’t notice. We simply adapt.

We don’t go through life with access to a master plan revealing how our environment has been arranged and rearranged so that it constantly guides our perceptions and actions. When it comes to shopping wisely at a supermarket or eating healthfully at a restaurant, we are handicapped by our built-in responses and tendencies. If we want to lose a few pounds, we might know that we really don’t want to eat cookies from a plate that’s in arm’s reach. But when we find ourselves eating them, we have no explanation other than to blame our imagined lack of willpower. We might believe that we consciously and willfully make these and other choices of our own volition. But science shows we may not be in control of all our behaviors.

Our limited self-control, our bounded ability to perceive our environment and to recognize behavioral triggers, and our hard-wired drive to eat more than we need are the immutable human factors that underlie our poor dietary behaviors.

There is now a mismatch between our evolutionary roots and our contemporary food environment. Far from ensuring our survival, our instincts—designed to function in a less toxic food environment—now threaten our well-being as they compel us to take advantage of the cheap calories that surround us.

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When the study was over, they finally let the kids eat the burgers!

PART II

The Food Environment

5

Abundant and Cheap

In the late 1970s, just before the obesity epidemic started to accelerate, I was attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. I lived off campus and either walked or rode my bike to school every day. I typically had breakfast at home, packed a lunch, and made dinner for myself at home. There weren’t many places to eat on campus—a few dining halls with limited hours for students on meal plans—and only a few small greasy-spoon restaurants nearby. On my way home, I passed a coffee shop, a deli, and a pizza place; there were no fast food chains within walking distance. There was a supermarket across the street from my apartment, and although it closed at 7 every night, stayed open for only half the day on Saturday, and was closed on Sunday, I never went hungry. When I graduated in 1981, my weight was the same as it had been when I entered medical school.

In the summer of 2008—twenty-seven years later—I strolled through campus for the first time since I graduated. The difference was astounding. Now, on the same walk from the center of campus to my old apartment, there is an abundance of food outlets and cafes. The University of Pennsylvania boasts sixty-one places to eat within walking distance of campus. More than a dozen food outlets are housed within classroom buildings on campus. There’s even a coffee shop in the school’s main library. (This would have been a sacrilege during my
college days, given the strict no-food policy in university libraries.) More than that, now there’s a Chick-fil-A, Subway, Jamba Juice, Top This (a burger and fries outlet), and Starbucks on Locust Walk, the main pedestrian thoroughfare crossing university grounds. Students who live on campus and use the meal plan have the option of spending their dining dollars at these places as well as at a Savory restaurant, Einstein Bros. Bagels, a C3 convenience store, and five different dining halls. There’s a new building in the Wharton School with an Au Bon Pain on the first floor and a cafe for MBAs on the second.

Campus dining services also feature what they call “fresh air food plazas,” which allow food trucks and carts on or adjacent to campus. According to the university’s website, at the corner of Thirty-Seventh and Walnut Streets there are Bento Box Japanese Foods, a Quaker Shaker Lunch Truck, Ali Baba, George’s Super Lunch, Kim’s Oriental Foods, Indian Foods, Trong’s Fresh Fruit Salad, and Pamela & Andreas Crepes Cart. The website boasts that “vending activity around the Penn campus has exploded to include more than 90 trucks, carts, and tables selling various foods and other products. And vendors, responding to the Penn community’s appetite for inexpensive, convenient foods, are currently doing an estimated $12 million in annual business according to a recent study.”

If the vending trucks don’t satisfy students’ appetites, perhaps Insomnia Cookies will do the trick. Started by Penn undergrads in 2003, the company serves a wide variety of cookies to hungry undergrads at fifteen other campuses. Available from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., the cookies can be ordered online and delivered to students’ dorm rooms. According to its website, “Insomnia Cookies was born out of our dislike of heavy meals late at night, our love of food delivery, and our realization that by the time we got hungry at night, nothing was open.” With varieties including Sugar, Chocolate Chunk, Peanut Butter Cup, White Chocolate Macadamia, Oatmeal Raisin, M&M, Double Chocolate Chunk, and Ménage à Trois (a cookie with three flavors), the cookies are hardly a light, nutritious alternative to the greasy fare available elsewhere.

With the cookies, the convenient fast food places and cafes, and the open-air plaza of food trucks and vendors—not to mention the all-you-can-eat buffets
at the university’s multiple dining halls—should we be surprised that college students today gain three to ten pounds in their first year away from home?
¹

The dramatic changes in the food environment at my alma mater mirror the thirty-year transformation of the American food environment as a whole, and I strongly believe that these changes are the direct cause of the obesity epidemic. In this short period of time, three important things have happened: the relative price of food has declined, especially for high-calorie foods filled with fat and sugar; food has become increasingly accessible; and cues to eat are more salient as advertising has become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Together, these three changes have made it possible for people to eat as much as they can, whether or not they intend to do so.

Lower Relative Prices

The major accomplishment of the Green Revolution, the wide-sweeping technological transformation of agriculture since 1945, was to increase the productivity of cereals, rice, wheat, and maize, staples for much of the world.
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Improvements in plant breeding, the creation of genetically modified plants resistant to pests, as well as new cultivation techniques and better fertilizers, improved crop yields substantially. Before the Green Revolution the maximum yield potential of rice was four tons per hectare. After improving the variety and adding fertilizer, the yield went up to ten tons per hectare. In addition, the growth duration was reduced from 150–180 days to 110 days, making it possible to plant two cycles of crops rather than just one in a year. Yield was also improved by developing disease-resistant varieties that could tolerate problems with soils, temperatures, and insects. The increase in rice production has resulted in a decrease in cost; on average, people are paying 40 percent less (adjusted for inflation) for rice now than they did in the mid-1960s.
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The consequence? The Green Revolution has saved millions of lives across the globe.