A Big Fat Crisis (8 page)

Although we may not recognize the triggers of all the behaviors that we engage in, we tend to think that other people (but not us) are affected by outside influences. It’s called the “third-person effect.” You and I believe that we are completely independent and that no one else can change our viewpoints. But other people are suckers and can be taken in.
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Some people might be able to recognize their own behavioral triggers, if they pay close attention or if someone points them out. But most of us have a limited cognitive capacity that precludes our ability to recognize the true reasons for our choices. The fact is that most of us are influenced every day by different cues and triggers in the environment. Even when these are pointed out, we often deny that they actually influence us.

There is no easy way to keep track of what we eat, and our ability to do so is further diminished when we multitask. Activities like driving, watching TV, or talking on the phone draw our attention away from the food and beverages we are consuming. If we watch the latest episode of
Game of Thrones
while we eat, odds are we will have little memory of how much we ate.

And little differences here and there really add up. Consider this: the average individual weight gain of twenty-two pounds over the past thirty years in the United States can be explained by a person eating just an extra seven calories per day.
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If most of us lack the brainpower to keep track of seven hundred calories per day, how can we possibly notice seven?

4

Eating Is Automatic

Imagine going to a meeting where cookies are served. It shouldn’t be hard to picture; cookies are a common incentive to get people to attend meetings. As you enter the conference room, your eyes scan the room, then fixate on the plate of chocolate chip cookies on the side table next to the coffee. This is especially likely to happen if you’re on a diet or if you’ve recently decided not to snack between meals.

You might think, “Uh-oh. Better sit far away from those cookies!” You might hope other people will eat them all, so you won’t have to think about them anymore.

No such luck. Someone grabs the plate and starts to pass it around the conference table. When that temptation-laden plate stops in front of you, can you pass it on without taking one? If you do manage to resist, will you be wishing throughout the meeting that you had taken one? Can you ignore any remaining cookies on the plate and still concentrate on what’s happening in the meeting? Will you go over and take one during the break?

How hard is it to say no to a cookie?

Our senses were designed to work automatically and reflexively. From an evolutionary point of view, our senses give us an edge to defend ourselves from threats from predators, as well as to alert us to opportunities such as new food sources. In every setting we visit, our
eyes automatically rove our surroundings. We orient our attention to anything that moves. If we hear a loud noise, we reflexively turn to investigate its source. The smell of smoke repels us, but the sweet aroma of freshly baked bread or the smell of grilling onions will stimulate the flow of our digestive juices. After signals are picked up by any one of our senses, the messages are directly transmitted to our muscles.

We have the capacity to respond immediately and unconsciously. The signal to our muscles travels about half a second faster than it takes for the signals to reach our conscious awareness. When it comes to matters of survival—fleeing from enemies and finding food—we are designed to act first and think later. If we hesitate, we risk losing our dinner to others or, worse, becoming dinner.

The Great Behavior Debate

There is a great deal of controversy about the role of conscious awareness in behavior. Some scientists believe that all behaviors are essentially automatic and that our conscious awareness is merely an “epiphenomenon”—just a curiosity of evolution that has no causal impact on our behaviors.
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More than thirty years ago, Benjamin Libet, a scientist from the University of California, San Francisco, conducted a groundbreaking experiment. He invited subjects to participate in a trial that timed the sequence between an action and awareness of the action. If an action is caused by an intention, he reasoned, a person should be aware of it before engaging in it.

Libet hooked subjects up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine to measure brain activity (i.e., awareness) and an electromyogram (EMG) machine to measure activity in an arm muscle. He instructed participants to flex their fingers or wrist. Surprisingly, the machines showed that subjects moved their arms and fingers before there was an EEG spike to show brain activity, which, presumably, would indicate awareness. There was a half-second delay between the onset of the action and the subject’s awareness of the action.
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Figure 2
illustrates the sequence of what occurs when we perceive something in our environment and respond.
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F
IGURE
2.
Time Sequence of Brain Activity, Action, and Conscious Awareness

Conscious awareness of our behavior appears to be activated
after
we begin an action in a secondary, indirect way, almost as an afterthought. Nevertheless, we usually have the feeling that our conscious intentions direct our actions.

Imagine a scene with a cat on a sidewalk, and the sidewalk is adjacent to a doughnut shop. When we observe the scene, we selectively focus on some of the elements. If the cat is moving, most people will look at the cat, because the eye gravitates toward moving images more than toward stationary ones. Yet parts of the brain outside conscious awareness will notice the doughnut shop. The brain might send a signal that could make the person looking at the cat start to feel hungry. Only after these hunger feelings start, the spectator might consciously notice the doughnut shop, but he may not realize it was the doughnut shop that caused the hunger.

A multitude of psychological experiments have also shown that our behaviors can be influenced by subliminal triggers—images too brief to enter our conscious awareness.
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Yet we are frequently blind to behavioral triggers even when they are not subliminal.
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Often, we simply don’t recognize the factors that activate our behaviors, even when they are in plain sight. We’re tricked into thinking that outside or contextual cues have nothing to do with our actions.

But as Libet’s findings show, the belief that we are in complete conscious control of everything we do is wrong. It is rare when we come up with an idea first and then act on it. More often than not, it’s
the other way around: we act, and then try to come up with a plausible reason to explain or justify why we did it.

Even though there is a great deal of evidence suggesting that we don’t consciously control much of what we do, many scientists find there is an important role for our conscious awareness. Some argue that consciousness has an integrative function: it’s useful for recalling past events and connecting abstract ideas to actions.
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Nevertheless, our everyday existence and most routine, mundane activities are dominated by nonconscious processing, a human attribute that largely explains why people find it very difficult to consistently limit how much they eat when too much food is available.

Captivated by Food

Which of these images grabs more of your attention?

Eye-tracking equipment has demonstrated that we automatically pay more attention to food images than to nonfood images.
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Moreover, we have a greater attraction to “vice” foods that are high in fat and sugar than to healthier “virtue” foods such as fruits and vegetables.

Just how fast do we respond when food is in sight? Researchers at the California Institute of Technology conducted an experiment to find out.
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First, participants reviewed a list of fifty snacks and candies and ranked their favorites. Then images of two randomly selected snacks from the list—for example, Kit Kats and Mars bars—were flashed side by side in front of study participants for twenty milliseconds. Participants were asked to choose their preferred snack as quickly as possible, with the knowledge that they would be given one of their choices
to eat after the experiment. They spent less than one-third of a second making a decision and were able to correctly identify which snack they had ranked higher more than 50 percent of the time.

To see if participants could be even more accurate, the researchers then asked them to make sure they were certain before making their choice. Accuracy improved to 73 percent, with the average decision taking less than half a second (404 milliseconds).
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In a study examining shopping behaviors, Manoj Thomas and his colleagues timed how long it took 151 subjects to decide whether to buy “vice” foods compared to healthier foods. The researchers found that buying decisions were made in less than a second, and the reaction times were even quicker and more automatic for the unhealthy foods (574 milliseconds for “vice” foods compared to 619 milliseconds for “virtue” products).
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Obviously, not much thought goes into decisions made that quickly.

Decisions about food can be so quick that no real conscious effort or direction seems to be involved. One of the preeminent researchers in the field of social psychology, Yale Professor John Bargh, refers to this kind of rapid reaction and decision-making process as “automaticity.” An automatic behavior, as Bargh describes it, is any activity we engage in without conscious direction, effort, intention, or control. For something to be considered automatic, it only has to meet these criteria some of the time. For example, walking can be considered an automatic behavior. Although we may use our conscious awareness to get up and start walking, once we are walking we do not need to use our conscious awareness to direct the right foot in front of the left, then move the left foot in front of the right. We can do this automatically. This frees up our conscious awareness to pay attention to other things.

Similarly, we can eat without paying any attention to the food in front of us. Although we are watching television, reading the newspaper, talking with a friend, or even driving, we can still manage to put food in our mouths, drink, chew, and swallow. Sometimes we may not even remember what or how much we ate. We may not even recall the taste. We may only realize we are done when the food is gone. We know we have been eating, but the details, the movements of food to
mouth, seem to happen on their own, without thought or deliberation. You’ve probably had the experience of unwittingly finishing a pint of ice cream or a bag of chips.

In addition to this kind of mindless or unconscious eating, etched into our DNA is the mantra “Eat available food,” a survival imperative passed on through evolution. Just as our eyes are captivated by food, our brains are wired to respond to food by secreting a neurohormone called dopamine.
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Dopamine is believed to be responsible for the urge to act on our desires. According to Dr. Nora Volkow, a renowned researcher on addiction and Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “The message that you get when dopamine is liberated in [the brain] is that you need to get into action to achieve a certain goal. It is a powerful motivator. It is extremely hard to overcome these impulses with sheer willpower.”
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Dopamine is intimately tied to our natural opioid system, which gives us a sense of pleasure and well-being. Dopamine secretion is also automatically triggered by novelty; something that is unusual and unique, that stands out from the average, creates cravings and desire, be it food or drug. This means we are hardwired to enjoy eating, which stands to reason from an evolutionary point of view. If we didn’t have the drive to obtain food coupled with the pleasure of eating it, the human species would not have survived.