That to be healthy and beautiful you need to look after the kitchen – choosing foods that should never be lacking to stay fit, according to the WHO – is certainly now known to all. Much less known is the fact that it is important to look after the kitchen also as a physical space. And not just to the kitchen: to the whole house.
According to science, in fact, it's not just stress, fatigue, worries or boredom that makes us get hundreds of superfluous calories a day (and at night: here, yes and no foods for nighttime snacks). Also the disorderin fact, first of all in the kitchen, it does not help the regularity of food and would rather push us to consume food in a chaotic way, just like the state of our home.
For this reason it is worth refreshing the results of a couple of academic studies – certainly not the only ones in recent years – led by Cornell University in 2016. The first research, conducted by photographing 200 women in their kitchens, found that where there were in plain sight cereal boxes, biscuits, sodas or sugary, the inhabitants weighed on average 9 kilograms more than the houses where the order reigned and all the food it was stored not in sight. The only element that helped the inhabitants not to transgress with highly caloric foods was the presence of a fruit bowl, with apples and other fresh fruit – that according to another, very prestigious university, that of Harvard, it does indeed lose weight.
The same research has also shown how disorder does not have such a strong influence on weight and eating habits men. For women, however, there is a strong psychological connection between the chaos in the kitchen and the inner chaos: the feeling of not having things under control led her to find compensation mechanisms, through the unregulated consumption of food. The speech then, tell the American researchers, also applies to the office: a study has in fact shown how to have a box of chocolates in sight at work increases daily food consumption by 125 calories.
A second study had tested a group of students in different kitchens: on one side, messy and chaotic environments, with food at sight, newspapers, telephone ringing, remains of meals; on the other a clean and organized environment perfectly. The girls had to wait an hour in the room, in total freedom. They had cookies, crackers, carrots before them. Well, those who stayed in the less orderly environment were the ones most likely to look for refreshment in the most caloric food and had consumed a greater quantity of biscuits. The consumption of crackers and carrots, however, did not have significant fluctuations depending on whether you were in the messy room or the neat one. Once again, the researchers could demonstrate that they live inside messy environments makes it more vulnerable to transgressing.
Eva Perasso
2 December 2016
updated January 2019
from Carola Traverso Saibante
Photo credits Flickr / Jamie Anderson
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