Well it turns out guys have the opposite problem: They eat more when there’s a woman around.
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In fact, according to the researchers, the male customers who dined with at least one female companion snacked on 93 percent more slices of pizza than those who shared a table with other men. But there’s been significantly less on what’s known as “disordered eating”-such as binge eating contests that reward people for eating as many hot dogs or steaks as possible-in men and what drives this”.
Interestingly, the women in the study were shown to eat the same amount of food, whether they ate with men or women, but when they ate around men, they still felt like they’d eaten too much and too fast.
“Men tend to overeat to show off – you can also see this tendency in eating competitions, which nearly always have mostly male participants”, lead researcher Kevin Kniffin, of Cornell University, explained in a university news release.
To conduct this research, researchers observed the eating habits of 133 adults at an all-you-can-eat Italian buffet for two weeks. That tendency to overeat extended to healthier options as well: Men ate 86 percent more salad in the company of women.
On a few unconscious level, overeating can impress others because it highlights fitness levels. Engaging in risky or unhealthy behavior, the thinking goes, demonstrates an extraordinary ability to tolerate challenges, even self-inflicted ones.
Pigging out at meals would seem more of a turnoff than an attractive trait, but the researchers say evolution may have programmed men this way.
“Conspicuous consumption of food is a much less dramatic “risk” than, say, going off to the front lines of war, but research on the effects of obesity nonetheless show overeating to constitute risky behavior”, added the study authors.
Regardless of the findings, Kniffin stated, reported by HealthDay via Philly.com, “people should calm down when eating with members of the opposite sex”. In particular, men are more likely to overeat when they’re eating their food in front of women. So are men willing to eat double their normal intake of pizza just to impress us?
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While the Cornell study suggests that men are the ones who overeat, it’s the women who report a sense that they are the ones who overdid it. Specifically, women eating with men reported feeling rushed during the meal and perceived that they overate despite researchers finding no evidence that they did so.
