Personality and Food

I work in personality.  I'm Director of Research at an internet start-up called Mindset Media, and we help brands target large audiences who have a common personality trait, like creativity, extroversion, or modesty.  We were founded on the premise that people are more than just a set of demographic stereotypes (age, sex, income, race).  People have individual personalities, and our personality traits, or Mindsets, relate to what music we listen to, what cars we drive, and how we vote.  Pretty cool stuff.

At the office, we subscribe to Psychology Today, and I picked up the new issue earlier this week.  Two surprises greeted me on the cover.  The first surprise was that the cover didn't show a half-naked beautiful woman.  (The folks at Psychology Today are a little too aware that sex sells magazines -- 7 of the last 10 issues feature a beautiful woman's face, a sexy woman's body, or cover the topic of love and relationships.)  The SECOND surprise was one of the featured cover stories -- "Caveman Cravings: The Allure of An Ancient Diet".  A random and hilarious intersection of two of my worlds: personality and food.  My co-workers and I had a good laugh.

Make no mistake, personality and food are strongly related.  That will be the topic of my talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium next year. I'll be blogging more about it, but if you want to waste four minutes of your life, you can listen to my interview on KFWB Los Angeles last year about beer and personality.

Stop by a newsstand and leaf through the latest Psychology Today.  The article gives a fair treatment to the evolutionary perspective on health -- perhaps the fairest and least sensational of the many recent articles.  Not one of those THERE ARE CAVEMEN LIVING AMONGST US, OMG, THAT GUY ISNT WEARING SHOES!!! articles.  I have to say, I'm getting a little tired of those.  How about this for a fresh angle?  Hunter-gatherer sex.  With the right photo of a paleolithic hottie, we could probably get the cover of Psychology Today.