The origin of the Clean Plate Club. or, It's not my fault, I blame the vikings

I'm continuing my man-crush on Cornell economist, Brian Wansink, whose book "Mindless Eating" is continuing to provide excellent insight and amusement.

"Give us your small, snack-sized livestock or I will smite thee!"

Given the topic of my blog, ManMeetsScale, I want to use at least some of the time to talk about various pressures and incentives men have to make not-so-good eating decisions.  On a personal level, I am very much inclined to ascribe all of my own behavioral failings to hidden societal pressures dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.  Really, if the Assyrians were a little more thoughtful, they would have established a culture and ethos of healthier and more mindful eating which then would have spread over Greece, then Rome and ultimately the parts of Europe that were worshiping trees at the time.  Instead, men in the times of yore were perfectly happy to eat until they had to vomit.  The Romans were quite good at this.  Heaven knows the Vikings were big feasters.  Give them a leg of mutton, and they were happy to sack another English village.  No doubt their own military adventures brought some of that Viking meal assault culture which then led Henry VIII to gorge on food on endless banquet tables.  From there, the next stop was the Superbowl.

The thing about Romans, Vikings and British kings is that they ultimately became role models for would-be gladiators and monarchs everywhere.  In other words, me.  I would have been an excellent Viking, and I'm sure I could have a rocking beard if I gave it half a chance.  For a long time, I definitely ate like a Viking, the approving nods of my buddies.

Then I discovered Weight Watchers.  Now I turn up my nose when faced with the meat buffet.  I rarely eat a sandwich, and I like salad an awful lot.  Clearly a sissy of epic proportions!  Real men eat sides of beef all at once, and they surely don't eat quiche.  Actually, I don't eat quiche either because it has way too much butter in the crust and is full of hidden calories.  Gracious me.  Am I so far on the unmanly eating scale that I'm to the left of the quiche eater?  That is troubling indeed.

Think I'm making this manly eating stuff up?  Witness yet another fascinating experiment by that clever Wansink over at the Cornell school of test subject deception.  He and his colleagues have done a number of experiments in which they observe people eating popcorn in movie theaters.  In one experiment they found that when women paid attention to how much popcorn they were eating, they ate less.  Makes sense, right?  Apparently, not for us super-smart men.  When guys indicated that they were paying attention to how much popcorn they were eating, they ate more.  Seriously.

However, his second experiment was even more telling.  They did an ingenious experiment in which they wrote a script/story of a guy on a date.  They randomly assigned people to read one of two versions that were different from each other in only one seemingly minor way.  In one version, the guy in the story ate a couple of handfuls of popcorn.  In the other, he ate almost all of his popcorn.  They conducted the survey with 140 college men and 140 college women.  Here were the results:

• College men:  the guy in the version of the story that ate almost all of his popcorn was consistently rated as stronger, more aggressive and more masculine than the two handfuls guy.  In fact, when asked how much they thought he could bench press, the full popcorn guy could bench an average of 21 pounds more.  Holy Toledo.  The popcorn was not even a central point of the story, which was a fairly detailed account about a guy on a date.  The seemingly subtle difference on how much popcorn he ate was enough to give him a 20lb bench advantage.  I am doing a chest workout tomorrow morning, and I'm seeing a movie with my kids today.  I just might have to check this out.  
• College women:  They didn't rate either version of the guy as either stronger or more masculine.  In other words, the notion that women care about how much we guys eat seems over-rated, at least in this experiment.  

So what does this little experiment tell us?  I have often heard that women work out and dress nicely to impress each other, not the men in their life.  Is it possible that we men are inclined to clean our plates (and sometimes eat them too) in an effort to impress each other?  Is this the fast food version of moose rutting?  

While this is mostly pretty amusing, I cannot help think that it represents at least one significant barrier preventing men from taking hold of theirs weight issue:  we worry about how we think our brothers will react to our doing something about it.  Statistically, men are 50% less likely to do something about their weight (and therefore their health) than women.  While women feel pressured by body image and the media to lose weight, it seems that men have the exact opposite incentive. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it would be a good thing for men to become slaves to body image, though I sadly see this happening in pockets.  However, it is also not a good thing for men to feel pressure to eat like a starving lion in an effort to impress others.  

I've been doing Weight Watchers and dealing with my weight for so long that I'm mostly past caring what my guy friends think about my dainty food choices.  However, I do, from time to time, feel a little self conscious when everyone else orders a steak served with a blue cheese blanket, and I'm asking for the simply grilled salmon with fresh spring vegetables.  According to Mr. Wansink, my concern over college frat guy approval is warranted.  Apparently, I can take some solace that at least the girls, or at least my wife, don't care.  

Cheers,

David