Chapter 33 — Further Reading

⚠️ Read this page with §33.14's warning in front of you. Behavioural nutrition has a poor replication record — small laboratory studies, in undergraduates, measuring a single meal, in a room, with no follow-up — and one prominent food-psychology lab had a large body of work retracted.

⚠️ What follows is ordered by how well it has survived. The first three sections are solid. The later ones are not, and are marked.

1. ⚠️ The two systems — the strongest material here

Appetite and energy-balance physiology reviews — ⚠️ on ghrelin, leptin, the incretins (GLP-1, PYY, CCK), and the distinction between satiation and satiety.

⚠️ Read at least one properly. The clinical endocrinology of appetite is much better established than the psychology of eating, and it is what §33.1 rests on. ⚠️ It also makes Chapter 24 §24.5 and the GLP-1 agonist material make sense as a single story rather than two.

Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson on WANTING versus LIKING — ⚠️ the incentive-salience literature.

⚠️ This is the single most valuable reading on the page. The dissociation between motivation and hedonic pleasure is well-supported, has an identified neural basis, and explains more everyday experience than anything else in this chapter. ⚠️ The original work is in animals and the human extension is more inferential — worth knowing, and it does not undermine the core claim.

Work on hedonic versus homeostatic feeding specifically — ⚠️ including the demonstration that reward-driven intake proceeds in energy-replete states. This is the threshold's evidential base.

2. ⚠️ Restriction and its consequences

Ancel Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation (1950) — ⚠️ the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

⚠️ A Tier 1 named study, and its findings are not in dispute. ⚠️ Read the behavioural chapters rather than the physiology if you read only part. The food preoccupation, ritualization, mood change and refeeding behaviour in psychologically screened healthy young men is the most important evidence in this chapter.

⚠️ A note on the ethics: the participants were conscientious objectors who volunteered as an alternative to military service, and consent under those conditions is not straightforwardly comparable to modern standards. The study could not be run today. ⚠️ That is worth holding alongside the findings rather than instead of them.

Restraint theory and the dietary-restraint literature — ⚠️ on the relationship between cognitive restraint, disinhibition, and preoccupation. ⚠️ The measurement instruments here are contested and the construct has been repeatedly revised; read it as a body of work with a real finding and a shaky operationalization.

Work on food insecurity and cyclical eating — ⚠️ the empirical bridge between §33.6 and Chapter 32 §32.10.

3. Child feeding — genuinely good evidence

Leann Birch's work on the development of food preferences — ⚠️ the source of §33.6b.

⚠️ The restriction, pressure and food-as-reward findings are among the better-replicated results in this whole area, ⚠️ partly because they were tested experimentally in children rather than correlationally in undergraduates.

Ellyn Satter's division of responsibility — ⚠️ the practical framework. Widely used clinically; ⚠️ note that its evidence base is weaker than its adoption, and that its core claim converges with Birch's experimental findings, which is the reason to take it seriously.

Repeated-exposure studies — ⚠️ on how many neutral exposures acceptance typically takes. ⚠️ The numbers quoted in popular sources are usually rounder and more confident than the studies support; the direction is solid.

4. Habit and behaviour change

Wendy Wood's work on habit — ⚠️ including the finding that people who appear to have more self-control report exercising it less often, because their environments generate fewer conflicts. ⚠️ This is the evidence behind §33.12's closing line.

Peter Gollwitzer on implementation intentions — ⚠️ "when X happens, I will do Y." One of the better-supported behaviour-change techniques, with a meta-analytic base, and exactly what Chapter 31's bad-night plan is.

Habit-formation timing studies — ⚠️ read one, if only to see where the 21-day figure did NOT come from. Median times to automaticity are far longer and enormously variable, and some behaviours never automate.

5. ⚠️ Read with real caution — the environmental-nudge literature

⚠️ This section carries a warning that the others do not.

Portion size, plate size, package size and choice-architecture work.

⚠️ Some of this replicates and some does not. The Cornell Food and Brand Lab under Brian Wansink produced a large volume of widely-cited findings in this area; ⚠️ many were subsequently retracted following investigation of the lab's statistical practices, and the associated books remain in circulation and continue to be cited.

⚠️ Practical guidance: do not accept a striking, memorable, counter-intuitive finding about plates, bowls, packaging or menus without checking whether it survived. Several of the most repeated ones did not.

⚠️ What DOES appear to hold: availability and proximity effects, effort effects, and the general finding that what is present gets eaten. ⚠️ These are also the effects Chapter 22's ward trial supports through a completely independent route, which is why this chapter leans on them and not on the plate-size material.

6. Intuitive and mindful eating

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, Intuitive Eating — ⚠️ the primary source for the approach.

⚠️ Read it knowing what it claims and what it does not. ⚠️ Its proponents mostly do NOT claim it produces weight loss, which is to their credit and is unusual in this genre.

The intuitive-eating outcome literature — ⚠️ associations with lower disordered eating, better body image and better psychological wellbeing are reasonably consistent. ⚠️ Much of it is cross-sectional, and the causal direction is not established.

Mindfulness-based eating interventions, ⚠️ particularly for binge eating, where the evidence is better than for the general population.

⚠️ And read §33.10's criticism alongside these rather than instead of them: the approach is a homeostatic strategy, and its weakness is precisely where this chapter's threshold predicts.

7. Sleep, alcohol and appetite

Experimental sleep-restriction studies measuring intake and appetite hormones — ⚠️ the finding that reward responsiveness to palatable food specifically increases is the interesting one.

Alcohol and appetite work — ⚠️ the acute aperitif effect, the non-registration of alcohol energy, and executive-function impairment as three separable effects.

8. ⚠️ Read critically — willpower and depletion

The ego-depletion literature and its replication crisis.

⚠️ Included deliberately as a case study in how to read a field. A famous, intuitive, widely-taught effect; large multi-lab replication attempts finding effects far smaller than claimed or absent; and an ongoing dispute about what survives.

⚠️ §33.12 was written not to depend on it. Check that claim yourself — it is a useful exercise in noticing what an argument actually rests on.

9. Where this goes next in the book

⚠️ One recommendation, if you read nothing else

Read Berridge and Robinson on wanting versus liking.

⚠️ It is one distinction, it takes an afternoon, and it will reorganize how you interpret your own behaviour more than anything else in this bibliography — including, quite possibly, behaviour that has nothing to do with food.