A Messy Kitchen Could Lead to Weight Gain

Between long work weeks and robust fitness schedules, we barely have time to keep up with our social lives let alone come home and clean the house every day. No shame. But there is one room you may want to make an extra effort to keep tidy: the kitchen.

While testing the idea that cluttered and chaotic environments stress us out, prompting us to reach for the junk food, researchers from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab recently found that clutter in the kitchen led people to consume more calories—and, conversely, a clean kitchen environment cut calories. (P.S. Is What’s On Your Kitchen Counter Causing Your Weight Gain?)

In a study of 98 women, the researchers asked half of the participants to wait for someone in either a clean, quiet kitchen and the other half to wait in a messy kitchen with newspapers scattered on the table and dirty dishes in the sink. Both kitchen environments had bowls of cookies, crackers, and carrots sitting out. They found that the women who had to wait in the chaotic environment consumed more overall, especially when it came to junk food—they had twice as many cookies as the group in the clean environment!

Excerpted from shape.com

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