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 “It’s easier to spend five minutes cleaning up your kitchen than 24
hours trying to resist snacks,” senior study author Brian Wansink,
director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by
Design, said by email.
To test how clutter impacts food choices and calorie consumption,
researchers invited about 100 college women to participate in what
they were told was an experiment exploring the link between
personality and taste preference. To sweeten the invite, the
students were promised course credit and a chance to win an MP3
player.
The small experiment was also designed to test how mindset
influences food choices.
Half of the women were randomly sent to an ordinary, clean kitchen,
while the rest were directed to an extremely disorganized room with
tables out of place and heaped with piles of papers, dishes and pots
scattered around.
Then, researchers asked the women to complete brief writing
assignments on one of three topics – a time when they felt chaotic
and out-of-control, a time when they felt organized and in control,
or a neutral recollection of the last class lecture they attended.
While they worked, women in the messy kitchen were treated to a
cacophony of distracting sounds as a researcher made a deliberate
show of cleaning up the room. In the clean kitchen, women worked
without distractions.
When they finished writing, the snacks came out for what women
thought was the main point of the experiment – a taste test of
cookies, crackers and baby carrots.
Women in the messy kitchen who had just finished writing about a
stressful moment in their lives ate more cookies – 103 calories –
than their peers in this room who had just recalled a time when they
felt organized and in control – they ate only 38 calories.
Meanwhile, in the clean kitchen, women given the out-of-control
writing assignment consumed 61 calories of cookies, compared to 50
calories for their peers asked to recall a moment when they felt
organized and in charge.
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One limitation of the study is that researchers didn’t assess how
the different kitchens actually made women feel, or the mind-set
produced by the various writing tasks, the authors note.
Because the messy kitchen also had noise and other distractions,
it’s also impossible to say how much the women’s snack choices were
influenced by the dirty room versus the other things happening in
their environment, the researchers also note.
Even so, the findings underscore that less cluttered, less
distracting and less chaotic environments might lead people to snack
less, the researchers conclude in the journal Environment and
Behavior.
“Eating healthy can be hard, and understanding the environmental
factors like kitchen clutter than influence our eating can help
individuals structure their homes in a way to make the healthier
food choice the easier choice,” said Lindsey Smith Taillie, a
nutrition researcher at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Maintaining a calm, clutter-free kitchen environment can help keep
us from overeating sugary snacks,” Taillie added by email. “When
that’s not possible, thinking about times of personal control can
also help prevent overeating.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1KKxLzX Environment and Behavior, online
January 7, 2016.
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