Mindful Eating: Emory University's Perspective

With all the hype around mindful eating in the media recently, I thought it would be interesting to see what Emory University students, faculty, and staff thought of mindful eating.  The aim of this mini-experiment was to begin to understand the extent to which Emory-affiliated persons define mindful eating and the comprehensiveness of their responses.

Throughout the past week I asked multiple Emory students, professors, and campus staff what they thought of mindful eating and how they would define mindful eating.  I asked some of the Tibetan monks studying science at Emory, professors in various departments in the college, college students studying everything from psychology to business, and campus workers in the dining halls.

Here is a representative sample of the responses I got:

• Emory psychology student: “eating is not just shoveling food in your mouth without thinking but taking the time to enjoy and to consciously attend to the act of eating”

• COX dining hall worker: “it means eating foods in colors and making sure your plate is bright because if you got colors then you got fruits and vegetables too.”

• Emory business student: “thinking about what you eat and what you put into your body and being aware of your health”

• Emory anthropology student: “watching the types of foods that you’re eating and that they have proper nutritional value; also trying to eat more organic and local foods”

• Tibetan monk: “mindful eating is when you have a meal and eat more mindfully by paying attention to what you eat and listening to your body”

• Emory international studies student: “eating healthfully”

• Emory professor: “being conscious of what you eat and how you eat; eating like the French!” 

Here is another way of looking at the responses:

To create this word art, I used Wordle™ an online word cloud generator, which sizes the words in accordance to their use.  Therefore, eating, eat, mindful, enjoy, and food, were the most commonly used words.  Other significant words include: body, consciously, time, meal, colors, and thinking.

Although I must acknowledge the overly apparent limitation that asking about mindful eating implies that mindfulness is an essential component, I still believe my findings have significance in understanding Emory’s ideas on mindful eating.  In addition, all participants were affiliated with Emory, an academic institution with strong initiatives in sustainability, the local foods movement, and home to leading research on mindfulness.  For these additional reasons, I must acknowledge the possible recall bias within the responses I received.

This mini-experiment sheds light on the general understanding of mindful eating among Emory’s population.  Overall, I was impressed by the holistic, comprehensive nature of the definitions and explanations of mindful eating. 

Looking at the general American population, obesity ridden, sedentary, and supporting busy lifestyles, I can only hope that their understanding be as well-informed as Emory’s population.  We have a long way to go to promote mindful eating as a means to improving the health, wellbeing, and life of the average American.