你的飲食習(xí)慣暴露了你的性格

The way you make your way around your dinner plate — meaning the steps that you take in actually eating that meal — may reveal gobs about you and your personality. Even more, for example, than that you're a pig or terrified of gluten or have an unnatural attraction to all things deep fried.

你在就餐時(shí)的選擇，或者你在吃飯時(shí)獨(dú)有的一些行為，都揭示了你的性格特征。打個(gè)比方，假如你是個(gè)胖子，你就有可能很不喜歡含麩質(zhì)的食物，而對(duì)油炸食品情有獨(dú)鐘。

Or maybe not. It's a tricky subject.

當(dāng)然，事實(shí)也可能并非如此。這有點(diǎn)棘手。

Take this type of eater: The guy (or woman) who spears a forkful of potatoes and finishes them off. Then moves on to the broccoli. And finishes that off. And then slides over to the chicken fried steak (or maybe it's filet mignon) to polish off the meal.

不妨看看這個(gè)例子：一個(gè)男人(女人)拿起叉子，先叉起了馬鈴薯;慢慢地細(xì)嚼慢咽完馬鈴薯后，又轉(zhuǎn)向了西蘭花;西蘭花解決掉了之后，這才開始吃煎牛排。這就是他們吃飯的順序，這就是他們進(jìn)餐的方式。

They're out there, these compartmentalized chow-downers, these isolationist eaters?, these ... whatever you want to call them. They exist. That's not debated. You may have even shared a lunch with one and not even noticed.

他們或叫做孤獨(dú)的食客，或叫做孤獨(dú)主義者……等等，無論你怎么稱呼他們都行。毋庸置疑，這些人的確存在于我們的周圍。我們甚至和他們一起吃過飯，卻并沒有意識(shí)到他們的存在。

What are we to make of those people?

我們?cè)撊绾慰创@些人呢?

"There's no real name for it. It's just conveying a personality type," says Juliet A. Boghossian, a self-described behavioral food expert and the founder of the site Food-Ology. "They're very ... I hate the word 'obsessive,' but I'm going to use it. They can be obsessive with their detail. Meticulous with the details. Order. Structure. They need the order and structure. And part of it, it's often because they're trying to protect the integrity of a given situation."

Juliet a. Boghossian是網(wǎng)站Food-Ology的創(chuàng)始人，也是行為食品專家，她說：“其實(shí)這并沒有什么明確的定義，只是暗示了某一種性格特征。他們……怎么說呢，算是強(qiáng)迫癥吧。其實(shí)我很不喜歡用這個(gè)詞，但事實(shí)就是如此。他們對(duì)細(xì)節(jié)非常在意，說是細(xì)致入微也不為過。吃的順序、怎么吃，他們都非?？粗?。這樣做的原因之一，可能是為了保持某個(gè)特定場(chǎng)合下的完整性。”

Boghossian likens isolationist eaters to another well-known kind of quirky eater, the one who insists that no food item on the plate touches another. Everything separate. Every portion to its own plot of plate real estate.

她將這類人與另一種食客聯(lián)系在了一起，即吃東西時(shí)要把盤子里的所有食物都分開的人。那簡(jiǎn)直是每種食物都必須呆在某塊小地盤里，相互不得越界。

The difference in those two eaters is that the one type — the one with the phobia over food touching — is fairly well known in science. Others, like the isolationist eaters, are not so well defined or studied, making it more difficult to come to conclusions or even make assumptions.

這兩種食客的區(qū)別在于，后者已為科學(xué)界所知，但是前者(孤立主義者)仍然是個(gè)未知數(shù)。關(guān)于他們并沒有明確的定義，也沒做過大量的研究，所以在對(duì)他們的行為做出假設(shè)時(shí)，也異常困難。

"I think it really depends on the behavior," says Nancy Zucker, a professor in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. "I think there's a lot of eating behaviors that we don't quite understand. Why an individual would complete one thing on their plate and switch to the next thing: I don't think that we understand the things that contribute to that. You can have all kinds of hypotheses, like people who have trouble with kind of executive functioning, switching back and forth in general. You can look at that. But we don't really know."

杜克大腦科學(xué)研究所(Duke Institute for Brain Sciences)認(rèn)知神經(jīng)科學(xué)研究中心(Center for Brain Sciences)教授南希·祖克(Nancy Zucker)表示:“我認(rèn)為這與性格密切相關(guān)。但這些行為中有太多我們無法理解的點(diǎn)了。為什么一個(gè)人非得吃完這個(gè)之后再吃下一個(gè)?我想這其中的原因我們并不太了解。你可以做各種各樣的假設(shè)，比如你會(huì)覺得這個(gè)人不太能做到這個(gè)舀一勺，那個(gè)叉一口。但這僅僅是假設(shè)而已，并沒有辦法驗(yàn)證。”

Food-touching phobias, Zucker says, have been studied. "When people have trouble with things on their plate touching each other, for some individuals — not for all — there may be an exaggerated disgust response," she says from Chicago, where she was attending the International Conference on Eating Disorders. "Disgust is an emotion that is designed to protect us from pathogens." To a food-touching phobic, a brown spot on a french fry could ruin an entire plate of food if not carefully isolated.

Zucker說，此前已經(jīng)有過關(guān)于“食物接觸恐懼癥”的研究。她在芝加哥參加國(guó)際飲食障礙大會(huì)(International Conference on Eating Disorders)時(shí)說:"他們會(huì)想盡辦法要把盤中的食物分的很開，對(duì)其中的某部分來說，這可能是一種夸大的厭惡反應(yīng)。厭惡是一種保護(hù)我們免受病原體傷害的情緒。對(duì)于他們來說，只要沒把食物都分開，哪怕時(shí)薯?xiàng)l上一塊小小的褐色斑點(diǎn)，都可能會(huì)毀掉這次用餐體驗(yàn)。

That brand of picky eating might seem a little over-the-top to many.

大部分人可能會(huì)覺得，這未免也些太挑剔了。

"But that's a good thing to some people to have that level of structure and order," Boghossian says. "At the same time it could be viewed as a bit rigid, [but] it's harder for [these eaters] to adapt to sudden change, [like] having everything thrown on the plate."

但Boghossian說，這對(duì)那些性格如此的人來說，是件好事兒。雖然我們覺得這樣很死板，但對(duì)他們來說，他們已經(jīng)習(xí)慣了，也很難再接受新的變化。如果不分開，他們就會(huì)覺得好像是把所有的食物統(tǒng)統(tǒng)都隨意堆在了盤中。

Uncovering Eating Clues

揭開背后的秘密

How we eat, if we've been doing it for very long, is something that becomes routine. Habits are formed in the brain, Zucker says. If we're used to eating past the point of when we're full, for example, we'll regularly do that, which can result in real health problems.

.Zucker說，如果我們經(jīng)常這么做，久而久之就會(huì)養(yǎng)成了這樣的進(jìn)食習(xí)慣。例如，如果我們經(jīng)常在吃飽之后還不停嘴，身體就會(huì)不適，還可能會(huì)出現(xiàn)各種各樣的問題。

Likewise, if we're used to picking around a plate in a certain manner, we'll often continue to do it.

同樣地，如果我們經(jīng)常把食物分開，這個(gè)“毛病”也就很難戒掉了。

Why? What do those different eating habits mean? What do they tell us about ... us? "There's so much about the microcosm and the micro-behavior that constitutes an eating episode that we really don't understand," Zucker says.

那這到底是為什么呢?Zucker表示，這些微行為背后的原因尚不明朗。

Boghossian's site, Food-Ology, features the tagline, "You Are HOW You Eat." She has spent more than 25 years studying how people eat and uses her own observations, along with some data mined from marketing research firms, to come to her conclusions. She's done food behavior studies for companies like Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin' Donuts.

Food-Ology上有這樣一句標(biāo)語：You are HOW you eat。Boghossian花了超過25年的時(shí)間來研究人們的飲食習(xí)慣，并且基于自己的觀察數(shù)據(jù)以及一些來自市場(chǎng)調(diào)查公司的數(shù)據(jù)得出了結(jié)論。她為像巴斯金羅賓斯和鄧肯甜甜圈這樣的公司做過食品行為研究。

"How you're eating reveals your behavior. It reveals your character," she says. "It's a wonderful way to truly reveal what a person's all about. What makes them tick. What motivates them. What challenges them. What they're fearful of. You can learn all of that by observing the way a person is with food."

"你的飲食方式暴露了你的行為，揭示了你的性格。這才是真正看透一個(gè)人的絕妙方式——是什么激勵(lì)著他們，是什么在挑戰(zhàn)他們，他們又害怕什么?通過觀察一個(gè)人吃東西的樣子，你或許就能更徹底地認(rèn)識(shí)他。"