Men Overeat In Order To Impress Women

Turns out, men are willing to eat a lot of pizza to impress us

In a study involving a lot of pizza, scientists have found that who you eat your meals with actually makes a lot of difference to how much food you consume. In particular, men are more likely to overeat when they're eating their food in front of women. And apparently they do this in order to impress them - yes, really.

To find this out, scientists at Cornell University studied 105 people over the course of two weeks as they ate at an all-you-can-eat Italian buffet. They noted down how much pizza and salad he or she ate, what gender their dining companion was, and then asked them to complete a survey asking how full they felt and how comfortable they were with said companion.

What these scientists found out was both shocking and kind of impressive. The men appeared to eat larger quantities of both unhealthy and healthy food when in the company of women. Men in the company of at least one woman ate 86 per cent more salad and 92 per cent more pizza than when they were in the company of only men. That’s almost double the amount of pizza.

On the other hand, women ate the same amount of food regardless of who they were dining with – but they were more likely so say they had overeaten and felt rushed when eating in front of a male companion.

So are men willing to eat double their normal intake of pizza just to impress us? Apparently so. Kevin Kniffin, the lead study author and a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University says, ‘These findings suggest that men tend to overeat to show off.’

He added, 'There is recent work that explores the possibility that eating spicy food might be a way that people ‘show off’ since it (arguably) signals a higher tolerance for something that others would consider painful.' Which might go some way towards explaining this rather odd way of trying to get our attention.