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After age 3, it turns out, the reasons we eat -- or stop eating -- have almost nothing to do with whether we're hungry. We're influenced by size, shape, music, colors and adjectives, but we're also in deep denial. We'd like to think we're calling the shots food-wise, but it just ain't so.

Call V-8 juice "Rainforest Smoothie," and suddenly, kids can't get enough. The same wine tastes better if the label says "California" instead of "North Dakota." Give people bigger bowls, they'll eat bigger portions -- then wildly underestimate how much they've downed.

Our stomachs, says Cornell Marketing Professor Brian Wansink, seem to have only three settings.

"We either feel like we're starving, we feel like we're stuffed or we feel like we can eat more," says Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. "Most of the time, we're in the middle; we're neither hungry nor full, but if something's put in front of us, we'll eat it."

Welcome to the great American pasttime: mindless eating. Wansink reveals just how nutritionally dense we all are in his book, "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think," a title with a double meaning -- we're not only woefully unaware of how much we consume; we also spend far more time chowing down than we do thinking.

Wansink has done hundreds of studies that show how fluff-brained we are when it comes to food. We tend to decide how much we're going to eat before we eat it, then suck down our food in less than 20 minutes, not giving our brains time to determine whether we were actually still hungry when we ate that last dozen cookies.

In one experiment, Wansink showed a bunch of college students a bowl of soup, then asked how they'd decide when they'd eaten enough. Only 19 percent said they'd stop when they were no longer hungry; everybody else eyeballed the bowl and said they'd be done when the soup reached a certain level -- usually gone.

So Wansink and his students devised a test: what if the bowl was never empty?

A spiffy idea, but devilishly difficult to pull off. Wansink outlined the steps he and his merry band of grad students took to create a bottomless bowl:

1. Check that the restaurant owner isn't around, then drill a one-inch hole where a waiter might set a soup bowl.

2. Drill a hole in the bottom of a soup bowl and attach rubber tubing to it.

3. Run the rubber tubing through the hole in the table over to a six-quart pot of soup.

Physics dictates that a pot placed at the proper height will keep partially refilling the bowl all day -- just enough so people think they're making progress, Wansink says.

If only it were that easy.

"Our bottomless bowls failed to function during the first practice trial," he says. "The chicken noodle soup either clogged the tubes or caused the soup to gurgle strangely."

So they did what any self-respecting food scientists would do: they bought 360 quarts of Campbell's tomato soup and started over.

People eating from non-tubular soup bowls ate about 9 ounces of soup, but diners with the rigged bowls ate and ate and ate. Most were still eating 20 minutes later, and some had slurped down more than a quart.

Both groups estimated they ate around 125

calories' worth of soup. The normal bowls were off by about 30 calories; the bottomless bowlers were off by more than 140.

Similar delusions take place at McDonald's and Subway restaurants. Wansink and company asked 250 people at each of those fast-food meccas how many calories they thought they'd eaten, what nutrition info they remembered and might be influenced by later, and exactly what they ate.

The McDonald's diners were generally clueless: Only 57 remembered any nutritional information, and of the 18 who were aware of lower-calorie options, only five had actually ordered those. The average diner pigged down 1,093 calories, but thought they had eaten only 876.

At Subway, 157 people recalled some nutritionals, and 63 remembered that some sandwiches had less than 6 grams of fat.

"The rest had a general impression that the food was 'healthy,'" Wansink says. "(They) ate under the illusion that everything they touched was good for them. This 'health halo' led many of these people to infer all Subway food was less caloric than is the case."

Subway eaters estimated they had taken in 495 calories but actually ate 677, adding cheese, mayo, chips and cookies because they thought their sandwich was "healthy." Wansink's conclusion: the better the food, the worse the extras.

So what's a mindless muncher to do? Here are two strategies:

Food trade-offs: These state, "I can eat X if I do Y." You can have a cookie if you exercise; you can have popcorn at the movies if you have a salad for lunch. You get the idea. "

Food trade-offs are great because we don't have to deny ourselves a food we love," Wansink says. "We just have to make a small concession in the name of good health."

Food policies: These are rules that you create, such as, "no second helpings of pasta," or "no soda pop on weekdays."

"They just eliminate one or two habits that have mindlessly encroached on our lifestyle," Wansink explains.

Making just three small, 100-calorie changes in daily food decisions, and you can weigh 30 pounds less in a year.

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