Clear your countertop, shrink your waist
The stuff on your kitchen counters may reveal more than whether you’re messy.
The stuff on your kitchen counters may reveal more than whether you're messy. A Cornell University study, suggests the food sitting there can predict your weight.
The researchers took photographs in more than 200 kitchens in Syracuse, NY to look for an association between the food environment and the body mass index (BMI is a ratio of weight to height) of adults in the homes.
It turned out that men and women who had fruit sitting on their counters were more likely to have healthy weights. But when sugary snack foods were handy, weights were heftier.
Soda pop was the worst for women, correlating to an extra 24 to 26 pounds. Women with ready-to-eat breakfast cereals on their counters weighed 20 pounds more than neighbors who did not. For men, candy on the counters was linked to 18 extra pounds.
"It's your basic See-Food diet – you eat what you see," said lead author Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand lab and author of Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. "Cereal has a health halo, but if you eat a handful every time you walk by, it's not going to make you skinny."
The study, published in the journal Health Education and Behavior, also found that normal-weight women were more likely to have a designated cupboard for snack items and less likely to buy food in giant economy sizes than obese women.
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