Researchers claim if a salad is the first thing we see we are more likely to eat it.
Don’t blame the food if you’re struggling to control your weight – blame the kitchen.
A scientific study has found we are three times more likely to eat the first edible item we see at home than the fifth.
So if a healthy salad is first in the line of vision, we are much more likely to have it for dinner than if the ingredients for it are stored at the back of the fridge behind a pile of fattening ready-meals.
Brian Wansink, professor of nutritional science at Cornell University in New York, said that where our food is stored has a huge effect on how much we consume.
His team took pictures of more than 100 kitchen cupboards and asked their owners to keep diaries of what they ate.
They then took another 100 participants and moved around the contents of their cupboards in different ways, examining the effects on what they said they ate.
Professor Wansink said: ‘We found a really strong tendency towards the food which is visible. If you put your least healthy food at the front of the cupboard or refrigerator, that’s the one you are most likely to eat.
‘You are much less likely to eat the fifth or tenth item you see when you come home tired from work.’
He added: ‘We have previously found if you have 30 cans of soup at home, you will eat more soup than if you just have ten
‘We have been wondering for a while if that would translate into the arrangement of food in your kitchen, and found that it does.’ The finding means everything in our kitchens has an impact on ‘visibility’, he says.
‘Cupboards where you cannot see food all the time are better than open shelving, especially for snack foods which don’t require preparation.
‘Having a smaller refrigerator and fewer cupboards, and putting the unhealthy foods at the back or out of reach, seems the best way to avoid temptation.’
The professor has previously found that changing from a 12-inch to a ten-inch plate makes you eat 22 per cent less, and that the average person will eat 92 per cent of what is on the plate, regardless of the serving size.
Photo credit: Digital Photography School
Via Daily Mail
