Why We Eat What We Eat: The Psychology of Eating

This volume explores the shift in eating research from the search for bodily signals that trigger hunger to a focus on eating patterns emerging from a learning process that is based on life experience. This new book offers hope that healthful eating patterns can be learned. The volume proposes models for normal eating behavior and discusses how and why eating deviates from these norms.
Leading investigators in the field present their findings on four factors that influence how our eating patterns develop: physiological factors, including those factors leading to taste aversions; developmental factors, starting with the effects of a pregnant woman's food choices on her child's later food preferences; biological factors, including genetics and the search for internal cues that prompt eating factors; cultural factors, including the powerful influence of family and social norms.
Why We Eat What We Eat explores how these factors interact to shape our individual eating preferences and discusses the implications of this research for practitioners. The volume also compares eating patterns in the nonobese and the obese person and discusses the short-term satiety factor that ensures consumption of a variety of foods.
Why We Eat What We Eat expands on themes in the well-received volume Taste, Experience, and Feeding and makes the information accessible to a wider audience. It will be of value to anyone interested in eating and its psychological aspects: health psychology researchers and practitioners, physicians, pediatricians, nutritionalists, educators, students, and parents.

Elizabeth D. Capaldi lives in Buffalo, New York, and is affiliated with the University of Buffalo.