Is Your Kitchen Making You Fat? We Are Three Times More Likely To Eat the First Thing We Seeby
Tamara Cohen
If you're struggling to control your weight, don't blame the food – blame the kitchen. A scientific study has found we are three times more likely to eat the first edible item we see at home than the fifth. So if a healthy salad is first in the line of vision, we are much more likely to have it for dinner than if the ingredients for it are stored at the back of the fridge behind a pile of fattening ready-meals. Brian Wansink, professor of nutritional science at Cornell University in New York, said that where our food is stored has a huge effect on how much we consume. His team took pictures of more than 100 kitchen cupboards and asked their owners to keep diaries of what they ate. They then took another 100 participants and moved around the contents of their cupboards in different ways, examining the effects on what they said they ate. Professor Wansink said: 'We found a really strong tendency towards the food which is visible. If you put your least healthy food at the front of the cupboard or refrigerator, that's the one you are most likely to eat. 'You are much less likely to eat the fifth or tenth item you see when you come home tired from work.' He added: 'We have previously found if you have 30 cans of soup at home, you will eat more soup than if you just have ten. September 28, 2011 Copyright © 2011 Daily Mail
|
