The extra pounds can come from where you least expect it. Because although it is obvious that the kitchen is a risk zone (or, better said, THE risk zone), no one had thought up to now to find out if having it clean or dirty , messy or in a magazine state, influences the quantity and the type of food you eat . And it seems so. And a lot.
This is what a team of scientists has discovered at the Food and Brand Lab , a center belonging to Cornell University, in New York.
The experiment has simply consisted of putting 101 women in the position of spending ten minutes in a kitchen where they could have cookies, snacks or carrots at their discretion. While half of the volunteers waited in a disastrous room full of thrown papers and dirty dishes in the sink, the other half did so in a scrupulously neat and tidy kitchen .
The result of this curious trial was conclusive: the former came out with twice as many cookies and 65 calories more in their body than the latter , as the researchers say in the journal Environment and Behavior. “Being in a chaotic environment and feeling like you're losing control is bad for dieting. It seems that it prompts people to think: 'if everything is out of control, why shouldn't I be?' . I suspect the same thing happens to men ”, explained Lenny Vartanian , Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and director of the study.
