WASHINGTON — Food placement can make a big difference in how much you eat.
Lean Plate Club blogger Sally Squires says that just seeing food or beverages can spark cravings, even if you weren’t feeling hungry before.
A team of researchers from Yale and St. Joseph’s universities studied where snack machines were placed in relation to the beverage machine at Google headquarters. “For men, the closer these two things were — they doubled their snacking,” said Squires.
“For women, snacking rose from 13 percent to 17 percent the closer these machines were to each other,” said Squires.
And evidently, the same holds true for your home.
Cornell University researcher Brian Wansink has been looking at cues in the environment that help us engage in mindless eating. He calculated the Body Mass Index for 500 families and asked what was on their kitchen counters.
“What he found was that what you have on your kitchen counter helps predict how much you weigh,” she said.
“So families that had fresh fruit on the counter, and pretty much nothing else — they tended to weigh less. But those who had candy or soft drinks or chips, or other things on the counter that could be very tempting — they weighed more,” said Squires.
Squires adds that one of the lessons, whether at work or at home, is “out of sight, out of mind.” Keep food on the counter that will be healthy and tempting. That way, snacking will be a mindless healthy choice, instead of mindless eating.
