The Power of Three challenge: To make three changes in the way you eat and keep it for 10 days. The payoff: We agreed to donate $25,000 to East Africa famine relief if 2,500 people signed up for the challenge. As you read in last Friday’s blog, we were successful in reaching this goal. Throughout this challenge, I thought that two of concepts were key: the mindless margin and the power of three. Brian Wansink, PhD, created these two concepts after conducting 700 experiments out of his Cornell Food and Brand Lab. The mindless margin says that you can eat…

Since we started the Institute over 20 years ago, our mission has always been to change the way medicine is practiced. That’s why we like to keep an eye out for opportunities to share tools you can use to help patients heal. So today, I’d like to give you a gift, just for following our work. It’s a session that I found particularly powerful – “Befriending Fear and Darkness: Mindfulness for Treating Anxiety and Depression” with Ron Siegel, PsyD. I’d like you to have the recording of this valuable session. It’s free – no strings attached. We truly appreciate the…

The Power of Three challenge was a success! We challenged practitioners to select three changes they would make to their diet and keep it for 10 days. Changes ranged from using smaller plates to applying the ½ rule (½ the plate for meats/carbs, ½ for vegetables/fruit) to putting your apples – or other healthier foods – on display. These change ideas came from experiments conducted by Brian Wansink’s Cornell Food and Brand Lab, as documented both in his scientific publications and in his book, Mindless Eating. We promised that if 2,500 practitioners signed up for the challenge, we would give…

The famine in the Horn of Africa just gets bigger and bigger, with no end in sight. According to the US government, an estimated 29,000 children under the age of five have already perished, with more than 600,000 additional children so malnourished that this death toll seems like just the beginning. According to the World Health Organization, 171,000,000 children were stunted as a result of malnutrition in 2010. In addition to physical stunting, these children will also experience a lag in neurological development, making learning a challenge. How can we as a global community have hundreds of thousands of starving…

You too would eat stale popcorn. Did you just read the above statement and think: Stale popcorn? Not me. Under the right circumstances, you most probably would be eating this popcorn right alongside your fellow nay-sayers. This is the way of mindless eating. But before we get to the bigger issue of mindless eating, let’s talk about this popcorn. Brian Wansink, PhD, directs the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and undertook the popcorn study. He took movie house popcorn and stored it for five days, until it was good and stale (but still safe to eat). He then handed out…

Who can forget Subway’s spokesman, Jared, who lost all of that weight by walking everyday to Subway in order to eat a vegetable sub for his lunch? His story revolutionized Subway’s image, making it seem like a healthy alternative to McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants. But is it really that much healthier or is it just our perception that has changed? Brian Wansink, PhD, the Director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell, has studied how environmental cues influence what we eat. One of his more than 700 food studies includes the “McSubway” study, which took a look…