To test how our living environments influence our eating habits, researchers from Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab recruited 101 female undergraduates and put half of them in a neat kitchen, and the other half in a messy one filled with mail, newspapers, and unwashed dishes. Adding to the surface chaos, the messy kitchens were also filled with noisy distractions including a ringing phone and an intrusive professor.
After telling participants in both kitchens that they’d be examined for correlations between personality and taste preference, researchers gave them a writing assignment. Participants were instructed to write about a time where they felt out of control or in control. In the meantime, they were provided with an all-you-can-eat snack supply with choices ranging from healthy (carrots) to mildly healthy (crackers) to unhealthy (cookies).
Study organizers found that women in the messy kitchen who wrote about being out of control ate nearly twice as many calories from cookies—an average of 103 calories—than women who wrote about being out of control in the clean kitchen (61 calories in cookies). As for carrots and crackers, kitchen cleanliness didn’t greatly affect whether women ate more or less of them.
via Mental Floss
