Food Science?

Summary

Campus Files: "Food Science?" – Detailed Summary

Introduction In the episode titled "Food Science?" released on April 23, 2025, Campus Files delves into the meteoric rise and dramatic fall of Brian Wansink, a prominent social scientist from Cornell University. Hosted by Margo Gray and produced by Audacy, the episode explores the complexities behind Wansink's acclaimed research on eating behaviors, the ensuing scientific misconduct scandal, and its broader implications for academic research integrity.

Brian Wansink's Rise to Prominence Brian Wansink became a household name in 2016 due to his innovative and widely publicized research on eating behaviors. As the head of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, his studies attracted significant media attention and corporate interest.

• Scientific Contributions: Wansink's work, such as the influential study on “bottomless soup bowls,” demonstrated how subtle environmental changes could influence eating habits. As Margo Gray explains, “People with the self-refilling bowls ate significantly more, supporting the idea that the more food you see, the more you’ll eat” (04:23).

• Media and Policy Influence: Wansink's research extended beyond academia, impacting public policy and consumer behavior. His role as the executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion from 2007 to 2009 allowed him to influence the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (05:41).

The Blog Post Admission and Initial Scrutiny In late 2016, Wansink authored a blog post praising a grad student who transformed a "failed experiment" into five publishable papers. However, this post inadvertently exposed methodological flaws in his research approach.

• Questionable Research Practices: The blog revealed that Wansink encouraged researchers to manipulate data post-hoc to produce publishable results, bypassing the traditional hypothesis-driven methodology. Margo Gray notes, “Brian had in effect admitted to the very kind of scientific malpractice they [the data thugs] were fighting against” (09:54).

The Data Thugs Investigation In response to Wansink's admission, James Heathers and Nick Brown, known collectively as the "data thugs," began a rigorous analysis of Wansink's published work.

• Identifying Fraudulent Data: The data thugs discovered blatant inconsistencies and instances of self-plagiarism in Wansink's papers. Nick Brown explains, “We pulled some of his papers and found that some of the numbers... couldn't possibly be right” (15:14).

• Reproducibility Crisis Context: Their investigation coincided with the broader reproducibility crisis in science, where many studies across various fields failed to be replicated. James Heathers contextualizes, “This very famous, well-regarded guy had basically written a blog post about how he abused the research process” (14:07).

Stephanie Lee's Investigative Reporting Stephanie Lee, a science reporter at BuzzFeed News, played a crucial role in uncovering the depth of Wansink's misconduct.

• Pursuing Hidden Evidence: Lee sought access to internal emails and records, navigating around Cornell's private status by filing records requests at collaborating public institutions. She discovered that Wansink’s lab prioritized flashy, publishable results over scientific integrity. As she states, “There was overt discussion of... gross statistical manipulation” (20:58).

• Impactful Findings: Lee's tenacity led to the publication of 14 articles, bringing widespread attention to the issues within Wansink's research and sparking public and academic outrage.

Cornell University's Response and Investigation Faced with mounting evidence and public pressure, Cornell University initiated an internal investigation into Wansink's practices.

• Initial Attempts at Resolution: The data thugs first attempted to address their concerns privately, but communication with Wansink and Cornell stalled, prompting them to go public with their findings.

• Final Investigation Outcomes: In September 2018, Cornell concluded that Wansink had committed academic misconduct, including data falsification and inappropriate research practices. Nick Brown reads from the final report: “Professor Wansink committed academic misconduct under our policy” (22:38).

• Consequences for Wansink: Following the investigation, Wansink was removed from all research and teaching duties at Cornell and resigned from the university in June 2019 (22:55).

Implications for Academia and Scientific Research The Wansink scandal highlighted systemic issues within the academic research environment, particularly the pressures to publish prolifically and attract funding.

• Incentive Structures: Stephanie Lee points out, “the behavior that gets rewarded in academia is to publish a lot of research... a general focus on quantity over quality” (23:15), which can lead researchers to compromise on integrity.

• Broader Distrust in Science: James Heathers discusses the long-term repercussions, stating, “Part of the collective distrust in science now is built out of entirely legitimate stories that describe scientists behaving in an untrustworthy fashion” (24:40).

• Call for Reform: The episode underscores the need for reform in academic incentives and stronger safeguards against research misconduct to restore trust in scientific findings.

Key Quotes and Timestamps

• Margo Gray [04:23]:
  “People with the self-refilling bowls ate significantly more, supporting the idea that the more food you see, the more you’ll eat.”

• Nick Brown [15:14]:
  “We pulled some of his papers and found that some of the numbers... couldn't possibly be right.”

• James Heathers [24:40]:
  “Part of the collective distrust in science now is built out of entirely legitimate stories that describe scientists behaving in an untrustworthy fashion.”

• Stephanie Lee [23:15]:
  “The behavior that gets rewarded in academia is to publish a lot of research... a general focus on quantity over quality.”

Conclusion The "Food Science?" episode of Campus Files provides a comprehensive examination of Brian Wansink's rise and fall, illustrating the fragile nature of scientific integrity in the face of institutional pressures. By highlighting the roles of investigative journalists and vigilant critics, the episode emphasizes the ongoing battle against research misconduct and the critical need for systemic change within academia to uphold the credibility of scientific research.

Attribution of Quotes:

• All quotes are attributed to the respective speakers with precise timestamps for reference.

Transcript

[Margo Gray]

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[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Courtney Harrell]

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[Margo Gray]

When you think of a scientist, you probably picture someone in a white coat tucked away in a lab far from the public eye. But every once in a while, one of them breaks into the spotlight.

[Ryan Reynolds]

On a recent weekday afternoon, CNN offered free chicken wings to anyone who wanted them if they filled out. A brief survey about food. Helping us Cornell professor Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating and a leading researcher on how people really behave around food.

[Margo Gray]

In 2016, a social scientist named Brian Wansink brought a wave of positive attention to Cornell University. His research didn't just live in academic journals, it captivated the public. He was the guy who helped popularize the idea that eating from a smaller plate can make you feel fuller. But that same year, Wansink made a startling admission, one that would call his entire body of research into question and pull Cornell into the center of a growing crisis in the world of science. I'm Margo Gray. This Week on Campus Files the rise and fall of Brian Wansink's food and lab and what it reveals about the future of academic research.

[Stephanie Lee]

The Brian Wansink story crossed my desk in the fall of 2016. Brian Wansink was a professor at Cornell University and he ran a lab called the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and it basically studied eating behaviors and food marketing.

[Margo Gray]

That's Stephanie Lee. In 2016 she was a science reporter at BuzzFeed News, covering exactly the kind of fascinating research that Brian Wansink's lab was known for.

[Stephanie Lee]

His work was all about basically how you could lose weight without severe dieting or intense exercise. His overarching theory was that people could be nudged into making healthier eating decisions by just adjusting elements of their environment.

[Margo Gray]

Weight loss is always a hot topic and any science backed strategy is almost guaranteed to generate media buzz. Brian's research was like catnip for TV audiences, especially since some of his findings were pretty wacky.

[Stephanie Lee]

People who sit farthest from the front door at a restaurant eat fewer salads and are more likely to order dessert. Eat by a window or at a high top table, you're more likely to order salads. There's if you want to drink less wine, choose a narrower wine glass versus a bigger one.

[Margo Gray]

One of Brian's most famous studies involved what he called a bottomless bowl of soup. Here's how it Everyone in the study was served soup. Some participants got regular bowls, while others unknowingly got bowls that secretly refilled themselves from underneath. The results were striking. People with the self refilling bowls ate significantly more and it supported Brian's idea that the more food you see in front of you, the more you're likely to eat. It was exactly the kind of quirky, attention grabbing research his lab was known for and Brian had a knack for getting the media to notice. So it's no surprise that his work also caught the attention of companies eager to turn those insights into profit.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I'm Dr. Brian Wansink from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. We've been doing a bunch of really cool supermarket psychology studies. One of the things we found is that if you have eye contact with something, even if somebody in a box, it looks more trustworthy and it increases your likelihood to purchase things.

[Margo Gray]

All that research helped land him professorships at top institutions like the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Then in 2005 he joined Cornell.

[Stephanie Lee]

Brian was also really influential in policy. So from 2007, 2009 he was the executive director of the U.S. department of Agriculture center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, and that's the center that does the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

[Margo Gray]

Brian quickly became a valuable asset to Cornell. His work with the Department of Agriculture brought in millions in grant funding. And the media buzz around his research was icing on the cake.

[Stephanie Lee]

Brian was a really high profile figure. You know, every time the media quoted him, it was, you know, professor at Cornell University. And that's a great look for an Ivy League university. You got a scientist who is in the media all the time, who the media is interested in, who is influencing the real world with the work that's going on in his lab. That's kind of the ideal academic from a university's point of view.

[Margo Gray]

Brian was at the top of his game. The Food and Brand Lab was turning out a steady stream of research. He was regularly appearing on tv, publishing books, even influencing public policy. So it's no surprise that his blog attracted plenty of attention, too.

[Stephanie Lee]

In the fall of 2016, Brian wrote a blog post on his website, and it was in praise of what he called the grad student who never said no.

[Margo Gray]

In the post, Brian heaped praise on a grad student who'd spent time at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab on a visiting scholarship.

[Stephanie Lee]

When she arrived, she was given a data set from an experiment that had been conducted before she got there. The original hypothesis had not worked out. Brian Watson called it a failed experiment. Failed was his word. And he gave her the data set, this visiting student, and encouraged her to find something usable out of it. And he was very proud of the fact that she ended up publishing five papers out of this failed experiment.

[Margo Gray]

It all sounded great until you looked a little closer. Hidden in plain sight was a surprising admission, one that most readers probably missed.

[Stephanie Lee]

The problem that Brian's blog post raised was that he explicitly said the original hypothesis we were going to test failed, but we found all these other connections in the data. The problem is whether those were actually valid or not.

[Margo Gray]

Think back to your high school science experiments. You always started with a hypothesis. You didn't look at the results first and then work backward to make a theory fit.

[Stephanie Lee]

It is highly frowned upon to have a data set, and you are kind of just running variables against each other and looking for statistical correlations that on paper, seem high.

[Margo Gray]

So why is that frowned upon? Because the whole point of starting with the hypothesis is to control for other variables. If you're testing how sleep affects productivity, for example, you'd want to factor out things like caffeine intake. Otherwise, the Results don't mean much. Brian's original study was supposed to examine how the price of a buffet influenced people's food choices. But under his guidance, a grad student started slicing and reshaping the data to support entirely new hypotheses. One of them was that men eat more when they're dining with women. It's an eye catching claim, and sure, it sounds plausible, but who's to say what other factors weren't accounted for? Maybe some of the men had worked out that morning and were just hungrier. That alone could throw off the results. Still, the finding was presented as if it met the usual standards of scientific rigor. And all of this was laid out plainly in a blog post by Brian, an admission that would ignite a nearly two year saga. One that put Cornell's prestigious lab under intense scrutiny and threatened to end Brian's career. And simmering beneath the surface was a much larger crisis in the world of science, one that was about to make everything even messier.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Courtney Harrell]

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[Margo Gray]

My son slammed like $6 with the.

[Stephanie Lee]

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[Courtney Harrell]

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[Stephanie Lee]

I really want these things. I want to own a house. I want to have a child. But this morning I really wanted a coffee.

[Courtney Harrell]

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[Margo Gray]

The missing.

[Lucia Blix]

Child is Lucia Blix, 9 years old.

[Stephanie Lee]

Please let her come back home safely.

[Lucia Blix]

Thursdays the kidnappers plumbed it meticulously.

[Margo Gray]

If money is what it takes to get her back, we're gonna pay it.

[Lucia Blix]

The secrets they hide. You can't talk about this.

[Margo Gray]

You can't write about it. Are the clues. The mother's hiding something. I know it.

[Lucia Blix]

To find her, tell me where she is. The stolen girl.

[Margo Gray]

New episodes Thursdays stream on hulu. It's late 2016 and Brian Wansink seemingly admitted in a blog post that his lab had manipulated data. Unsurprisingly, his post quickly drew some attention.

[James Heathers]

I am a forensic metascientist. That means I computationally study the results of other scientific papers, usually to determine whether or not they're accurate and honest.

[Margo Gray]

James is part of an informal group of other forensic metascientists. Here's another member of that group, Nick Brown.

[Nick Brown]

I'm a retired computer guy and I found myself increasingly interested in bad science and then in terrible science and then in essentially fraudulent science.

[Margo Gray]

Nick and James share a mission, calling out bad science. When they see it, they think of themselves as a kind of scientific watchdog. So much so that they've given themselves an avengers style. The data thugs. At the time of Brian's blog post, the data thugs already had their hands full. The world of research was in the middle of a major crisis, something called the reproducibility crisis. It sounds technical, but the idea is simple. If one scientist runs an experiment, another should be able to do the same thing and get the same results. Take one of Brian's claims for example, that men eat more when dining with women. If that's really the case, then repeating the experiment under the same conditions should lead to the same outcome. But by the early 2010s, researchers were discovering that wasn't always happening. Some of the most influential studies in psychology and medicine, including up to 80 to 90% of cancer research, couldn't be replicated. Entire fields were suddenly called into question, along with decades of follow up studies and millions of dollars in funding. So when the data thugs came across Brian's blog post, they knew something wasn't right.

[James Heathers]

Everyone hit the roof because this was in the dead center of the kind of emotional part of the replication crisis in the Kubler Ross grief stages. Everyone would have been at anger and in the middle of having this very broad, increasingly organized skepticism towards the social sciences. This very famous, well regarded guy had basically written a blog post about how he abused the research process.

[Margo Gray]

Brian had in effect admitted to the Very kind of scientific malpractice they fighting against.

[Nick Brown]

We got DMing and we said, I wonder what his papers look like. And so we pulled some of his papers and started going through it using some of the very basic numerical analysis tools. I mean, they're sixth grade arithmetic which enable you to look at some numbers in a paper and say, those can't possibly be right. That number can't be that number divided by this other number. Really, as simple as that.

[Margo Gray]

Right away, the data thugs found that some of the numbers in Brian's papers weren't just questionable, they were outright impossible.

[Nick Brown]

And then we started noticing plagiarism. Mostly self plagiarism.

[Margo Gray]

Self plagiarism is when an author reuses the same text or data across multiple books or studies, but presents it as if it's brand new.

[Nick Brown]

So two papers describing ostensibly different samples, but with exactly the same numbers in the tables. Yeah, it got pretty sticky.

[Margo Gray]

Often the issues the data thugs uncover are just honest mistakes. In those cases, they see no need to publicly call out a scientist. They say it wouldn't be fair or particularly productive.

[James Heathers]

We very rarely find ourselves in a position where you analyze a paper and say, that's fraud. That almost never happens. You don't know that. And there's a huge distinction between someone made them mistake dragging and dropping a column in Excel versus someone made the study up completely.

[Margo Gray]

Based on the blog post alone, it was clear that the problems with Brian's research went far beyond a simple Excel mistake. Still, the data thugs decided it was best to raise their concerns privately. They reached out to Brian and to Cornell with what they'd found. At first, Brian seemed open to the conversation. But before long, the dialogue stalled. So the data thugs ultimately went public, in part because other scientists were building their work on top of these flawed studies.

[Nick Brown]

We started writing about it, we started blogging about it. Somebody, I was writing one a week and someone said, oh, it's Wansink Wednesday.

[Margo Gray]

Nick's Wansink Wednesday posts and the growing online chatter eventually forced Cornell to launch an internal investigation. When it wrapped, the university acknowledged problems with the data, but stopped short of calling it scientific misconduct. Still, Nick and the data thugs weren't ready to back down. By mid-2017, they'd flagged nearly 50 papers with potential issues, and the list kept growing. But despite the mounting evidence, nothing was being done. That changed when the story burst into public view and major news outlets started paying attention.

[Stephanie Lee]

The other words of the year, they were just as online. You know, Oxford's was brain rot, if.

[Margo Gray]

You can Believe it.

[Stephanie Lee]

Its first use was in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau. RIP Henry David Thoreau. You would have hated TikTok.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Wait, Candace, we should probably introduce ourselves.

[Stephanie Lee]

You're so right, Kate. Hello, listeners. We are the hosts of icymi, or rather, in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about Internet culture.

[Ryan Reynolds]

We're extremely online, so you don't have to be.

[Stephanie Lee]

Follow ICYMI now wherever you listen.

[Margo Gray]

The data thugs had hit a wall. Cornell had closed its investigation without labeling Bryan's research as scientific misconduct, and Brian had stopped responding to them altogether. Meanwhile, his findings continued to spread, seeping into the media and popular culture unchecked.

[Stephanie Lee]

By spring of 2017, summer of 2017, there are still all these papers at this point that Nick and his colleagues had been looking at.

[Margo Gray]

That's Stephanie Lee, who you heard at the beginning of the episode. At the time, she was a science reporter at BuzzFeed News.

[Stephanie Lee]

They had a list of, like, 50 papers that they had questions about, and they were just sitting out there in the literature. And so to me, I thought, is this really the end of the story?

[Margo Gray]

So after seeing what the data thugs had uncovered, Stephanie was determined to dig deeper and to find new ways into the story.

[Stephanie Lee]

I thought it'd be really illuminating, possibly to see the emails that this lab was exchanging among itself.

[Margo Gray]

Stephanie wanted a look inside the lab to understand what kinds of conversations were happening behind closed doors. Normally, that's where public records requests come in. But there was a problem. Cornell is a private university, which means it's exempt. Still, Stephanie was a savvy reporter, and she found a workaround. She knew Brian had collaborated with researchers at public universities across the country, places that were subject to records requests. So she cast a wide net and filed requests at multiple schools.

[Stephanie Lee]

It became very clear, looking at these emails, that there was really, like, a blatant disregard for careful scientific practice.

[Margo Gray]

Almost immediately, it was clear the data thugs were onto something big. And the deeper Stephanie dug, the more obvious it was. Brian's lab wasn't driven by the pursuit of science, but by the pursuit of headlines and publications.

[Stephanie Lee]

There is a very explicit theme running throughout these emails of we need to publish studies that have cool headlines, that have cool findings. Let's analyze the experiments we did until we get something usable. We need to publish as much as possible. Studies that just sit on our desk are like inventory that hasn't been shipped. We need to think like Apple. We need to ship our science out to the world as much as possible. There was overt discussion of, like, gross statistical manipulation of so many of the experiments they conducted.

[Margo Gray]

To confirm she was interpreting things correctly, Stephanie ran these emails by some scientists.

[Stephanie Lee]

One expert I talked to at the time and asked him what he thought of the correspondence. He said, this is not science, this is storytelling.

[Margo Gray]

That's a pretty damning assessment of the lab's research. And the lab's response was not exactly reassuring.

[Stephanie Lee]

I got back a bunch of emails from them talking about, we're under attack, we're under siege. People want to know what happened with these papers. We can't find the data. Do you have the data? And so I just showed them scrambling and trying to defend themselves. In some cases, they were talking about studies that were going to be retracted or had problems that we didn't know about publicly yet, or they were talking about studies that were being questioned but had much deeper problems that they were talking about behind the scenes.

[Margo Gray]

Armed with her interviews and research, Stephanie began publishing her findings. Over the next year, she wrote 14 articles about Brian and the Food and Bran Lab. And as public attention grew, more and more of Bryan's papers came under scrutiny. Then, in the spring of 2018, nearly a year and a half after Brian's blog post, a wave of his papers were either retracted or corrected. At that point, Cornell had little choice but to reopen its investigation. Issues with their most well known lab could easily risk their reputation as a research institution. And in September 2018, Cornell announced its findings. Here's Nick reading from the final report.

[Nick Brown]

Cornell's investigation found that Professor Wansing committed academic misconduct under our policy. The committee found the practices identified included data falsification, a failure to ensure data accuracy and integrity, inappropriate attribution of authorship, inappropriate research.

[Margo Gray]

Brian was removed from all research and teaching duties at Cornell, though he continued to help review his published papers. Then, in June 2019, he resigned from the university altogether. But as Stephanie points out, this isn't just the story of one bad apple. It's part of a much bigger problem.

[Stephanie Lee]

Traditionally, the behavior that gets rewarded in academia is to publish a lot of research in a pretty short amount of time. Research that gets funding, that gets media attention. And there is a general focus, many scholars would say, on quantity over quality. That can be one big factor when you are trying to get hired somewhere or you're trying to get tenure at a university. You can say, look at all these studies I've done. I'm so productive.

[Margo Gray]

For many researchers, the easiest path to success is publishing as much as possible, especially studies that are flashy and grab media attention. That kind of visibility boosts a university's reputation and helps bring in funding. Seen through that lens, Brian was just playing the game. Since the incentives built into modern science push researchers in that direction, here's James Heathers, one of the data thugs.

[James Heathers]

There's nothing to prevent me. Nothing except the social reputation of being able to do this, to go next year and to just publish 50 separate scientific papers on whatever I feel like a very definitely questionable forms of accuracy. If I did that, absolutely no one could stop me.

[Margo Gray]

And when things work that way, the consequences can be far reaching.

[James Heathers]

Part of the collective distrust in science now is built out of entirely legitimate stories that describe scientists behaving in an untrustworthy fashion. And I have said for many years that there will be a reckoning of this. And given the present political environment and the collective skepticism, a lot of which of course has nothing to do with this. But this is far from helping. I think there's now an environment where really punitive and damaging things could happen.

[Margo Gray]

So what's the harm if someone eats off a smaller plate believing it'll help them feel full? Probably not much. But for Nick James and the other data thugs, this battle isn't just about one researcher. It's part of the much larger war against bad science.

[Nick Brown]

There's a scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan from Tom Hanks character is badly wounded. He's gonna die. He's up against the wall. The German tanks are counter attacking and Tom Hanks is a man of duty and his standing orders are that he must continue to engage the enemy with all means available. And all he's got is his service revolver. He takes his revolver and he starts shooting it at the tank. He's got six shots here, and as he fires the sixth shot, the tank explodes. And he sort of looks slightly bemused for half a second as to how he's managed to blow up his tank with a revolver and then these two American B51s go over which have just blown the tank up with rockets. I like to think of myself a little bit as, yeah, we've got to go through this. And you know, there are times you've got to write to editors and you know that nothing much will happen. And just occasionally, just occasionally, someone blows up the tank.

[Margo Gray]

Campus Files is an Odyssey original podcast. This episode was written and reported by Ian Mont. Campas Files is produced by Ian Mont Eliot Adler and me, Margo Gray. Our executive producers and story editors are Maddie Sprunkheiser and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basel and Andy Jaskowitz. Special thanks to Jenna Weiss Berman, J.D. crowley, Leah Rhys Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hilary Schuff, Sean Cherry, Laura Berman and Hilary Van Ornam. Original theme music by James Waterman and Davey Sumner. If you have tips or story ideas, write to [e-mail].

[Lucia Blix]

Some people play it safe, but that's never been my style. I'm Soraya and this is is Rule breakers, the podcast where we celebrate the rebels, the misfits, and the ones who make their own way. Every week I sit down with athletes, entertainers and industry disruptors who don't just push the boundaries now, they shatter them. We talk about the wildest risks they've taken, the lessons they've learned, and the moments that made them who they are. No filters, no bs, just real talk with people who are refuse to follow the script. And we don't just talk about breaking the rules now we prove it. Think dog shot collars, bug trivia, blindfold tattoos and text roulette. The stakes are high and the chaos is real, so if you've ever been told to stay in your lane, this show is for you. Follow and listen to Rule breakers with Saraya, an Odyssey podcast available now for free on the Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.