Brian Wansink

Brian Wansink was born in Sioux City, Iowa.[9] He was raised in a blue-collar family and is the older brother of Craig Wansink,[10] a professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan.[11] Wansink received a B.S. in business administration from Wayne State College (Nebraska) in 1982 and an M.A. in journalism and mass communication from Drake University in 1984, followed by a Ph.D. in marketing (consumer behavior) in 1990 from Stanford Graduate School of Business.[1]

Cornell Food and Brand Lab outreach

Wansink's first academic appointment was to the faculty of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (1990–1994). He then taught at the Wharton Graduate School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (1995–1997) and went on to a position as a marketing, nutritional science, advertising, and agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1997–2005) before moving to the Department of Applied Economics and Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University in 2005.[1]

He set up a nonprofit foundation to support his work in 1999.[9][10]

Wansink's research focused on ways people make choices—for example, how portion sizes affect food intake. Some of his work led to the introduction of mini-size packaging.[12] Another of his papers found that people who eat with someone who is fat will make worse food choices, which the UK National Health Service described as "not wholly convincing and does not prove this phenomenon exists in the general population."[13]

In 2005, Wansink's lab published experimental findings in a paper called "Bottomless bowls: why visual cues of portion size may influence intake". In this study, the lab built an apparatus containing a tube that pumped soup into the bottom of a bowl at a steady rate as the participant ate. Those who ate from the bottomless bowl ate more soup than those whose bowls were filled manually, thus making them more aware of the amount they ate.[14][15] In 2007, Wansink received the Ig Nobel Prize in nutrition for the "bottomless bowls" study.[16] The experiment's data and analysis were challenged as part of the review of Wansink's body of work that started in 2017.[17]

In 2006, Wansink published Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.[12] It was described as a popular science book combined with a self-help diet book, as each chapter ends with brief advice on eating.[18] The book details Wansink's research into what, how much, and when people eat.[12][19] The book was cited by National Action Against Obesity as being helpful in efforts to curb obesity in the United States.[20]

Wansink was appointed as the executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion from November 2007 through January 2009. He was responsible for oversight of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, MyPyramid.gov, and various other food-related programs administered by the USDA.[21] In 2011, Wansink was elected to a one-year-term as president of the Society for Nutrition Education.[22]

In a 2009 paper retracted in 2018,[23] a team led by Wansink described their finding that calorie counts in The Joy of Cooking had gone up around 44% since the cookbook's first edition in 1936, and related this to the obesity epidemic. Over time this finding became a shorthand way to refer to the unhealthy Western pattern diet. The publisher of Joy of Cooking, John Becker, noticed that Wansink's sample size was small, consisting of only 18 recipes out of about 4500 that were published during the study time interval, and did his own analysis of changes in calories in the recipes. In 2017, after news of Wansink's research practices became widely discussed in the media, Becker sent his results to several statisticians, including James Heathers, a behavioral scientist at Northeastern University. Heathers found Wansink's conclusions to be invalid, and found a number of problems with Wansink's paper, including counting a whole cake as a "serving" and comparing a recipe for a clear chicken soup with one for gumbo.[24][25]

Wansink's second book, Slim by Design, was released in 2014. In the same year he ran a Kickstarter campaign and raised around $10,000 to fund a coaching program based on the book; as of February 2018 the program had not been produced.[26]

In 2017 Wansink's research came under scrutiny, leading to several retractions and corrections and an investigation by Cornell into the integrity of his work. In September 2018, Cornell determined that Wansink had committed scientific misconduct and removed him from all teaching and research positions; he was only allowed to help in investigations of his published work. He also resigned from the university, effective June 30, 2019.[6] After the announcement of his misconduct and resignation, Wansink acknowledged in emails to Buzzfeed that there had been some problems with his publications but also wrote, "There was no fraud, no intentional misreporting, no plagiarism, or no misappropriation."[6] Cornell released a summary of its investigation, in which it stated, "The practices identified included data falsification, a failure to assure data accuracy and integrity, inappropriate attribution of authorship of research publications, inappropriate research methods, failure to obtain necessary research approvals, and dual publication or submission of research findings."[27]

• Sudman, Seymour; Wansink, Brian (2002). Consumer Panels (2nd ed.). Chicago, Ill.: American Marketing Association. ISBN 978-0-87757-297-8.
• Bradburn, Norman M.; Sudman, Seymour; Wansink, Brian (2004). Asking Questions: The Definitive Guide to Questionnaire Design for Market Research, Political Polls, and Social and Health Questionnaires (Rev. ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 978-0-7879-7088-8.
• Wansink, Brian (2004). Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity (First Illinois paperback ed.). Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-02942-4.
• Wansink, Brian (2006). Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. New York: Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-80434-8.
• Wansink, Brian (2014). Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 978-0062136527.

Wansink is married and has three daughters.[36] His wife trained as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu.[37]

• List of scientific misconduct incidents

• Official website

• van der Zee, Tim; 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. hdl:1887/57534. ISSN 2167-9843. Retrieved 15 March 2017.
• Wansink, Brian (April 2017). "A Note from Brian Wansink on Research". Archived from the original on 5 April 2017.
• Wansink, Brian. "Authors' responses to "Statistical heartburn: An attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab"" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 April 2017.
• Wansink, Brian. "Responses to "Statistical Heartburn: An Attempt to Digest Four Pizza Publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab" - Table of 150 Inconsistencies" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 April 2017.
• "Cornell University Statement Regarding Questions About Professor Brian Wansink's Research". Cornell University. 5 April 2017. Archived from the original on 19 March 2018.
• "Statement of Cornell University Provost Michael I. Kotlikoff". Cornell University. September 20, 2018. Archived from the original on September 21, 2018.