你的飲食習慣暴露了你的性格

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.

你在就餐時的選擇，或者你在吃飯時獨有的一些行為，都揭示了你的性格特征。打個比方，假如你是個胖子，你就有可能很不喜歡含麩質的食物，而對油炸食品情有獨鐘。

Or maybe not. It's a tricky subject.

當然，事實也可能并非如此。這有點棘手。

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.

不妨看看這個例子：一個男人(女人)拿起叉子，先叉起了馬鈴薯;慢慢地細嚼慢咽完馬鈴薯后，又轉向了西蘭花;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.

他們或叫做孤獨的食客，或叫做孤獨主義者……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，卻并沒有意識到他們的存在。

What are we to make of those people?

我們該如何看待這些人呢?

"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是網站Food-Ology的創(chuàng)始人，也是行為食品專家，她說：“其實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，算是強迫癥吧。其實我很不喜歡用這個詞，但事實就是如此。他們對細節(jié)非常在意，說是細致入微也不為過。吃的順序、怎么吃，他們都非?？粗亍＿@樣做的原因之一，可能是為了保持某個特定場合下的完整性。”

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，即吃東西時要把盤子里的所有食物都分開的人。那簡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，后者已為科學界所知，但是前者(孤立主義者)仍然是個未知數(shù)。關于他們并沒有明確的定義，也沒做過大量的研究，所以在對他們的行為做出假設時，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."

杜克大腦科學研究所(Duke Institute for Brain Sciences)認知神經科學研究中心(Center for Brain Sciences)教授南希·祖克(Nancy Zucker)表示:“我認為這與性格密切相關。但這些行為中有太多我們無法理解的點了。為什么一個人非得吃完這個之后再吃下一個?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，比如你會覺得這個人不太能做到這個舀一勺，那個叉一口。但這僅僅是假設而已，并沒有辦法驗證。”

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，此前已經有過關于“食物接觸恐懼癥”的研究。她在芝加哥參加國際飲食障礙大會(International Conference on Eating Disorders)時說:"他們會想盡辦法要把盤中的食物分的很開，對其中的某部分來說，這可能是一種夸大的厭惡反應。厭惡是一種保護我們免受病原體傷害的情緒。對于他們來說，只要沒把食物都分開，哪怕時薯條上一塊小小的褐色斑點，都可能會毀掉這次用餐體驗。

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

大部分人可能會覺得，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，但對他們來說，他們已經習慣了，也很難再接受新的變化。如果不分開，他們就會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，如果我們經常這么做，久而久之就會養(yǎng)成了這樣的進食習慣。例如，如果我們經常在吃飽之后還不停嘴，身體就會不適，還可能會出現(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，如果我們經常把食物分開，這個“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上有這樣一句標語：You are HOW you eat。Boghossian花了超過25年的時間來研究人們的飲食習慣，并且基于自己的觀察數(shù)據以及一些來自市場調查公司的數(shù)據得出了結論。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人的絕妙方式——是什么激勵著他們，是什么在挑戰(zhàn)他們，他們又害怕什么?通過觀察一個人吃東西的樣子，你或許就能更徹底地認識他。"