Men Eat More Pizza When Trying to Impress Women

As a new study shows, men eat twice as much as they would normally eat in the presence of women. Dear men, you can change down a gear!

Twice as much pizza

Researchers at Cornell University in New York have published a new study on the eating habits of women and men. The experts observed 105 adults over a period of two weeks at an Italian all-you-can-eat buffet lunch. The result: If the men were in female company, they ate almost twice as much pizza. In the presence of other men, they ate normally. Surprisingly, the increased eating behaviour also had an effect on healthy food: Men ate 86% more salad than men alone.

Women show no change

Whether women ate with men or their own sex: the eating habits didn’t change. The only difference was in habitus: women who were accompanied by men at lunchtime expressed clearly more that they had rushed and ate too much. This result fits in with a paper published earlier this year at the South Korean university “Semyung”. It was found that men took bigger bites than their female companions. Women, on the other hand, took considerably more time chewing.

Why is eating behavior changing?

The experts assume that the men tried to impress their female companions by not putting any emphasis on calories and shoving pounds of pepperoni into their mouths. The researchers attribute the fact that they were also more likely to eat salad to the fact that men wanted to prove to women that their supposed “fear of vegetables” did not correspond to reality.

The researchers also explained the change by the fact that men apparently saw an overconsumption of food as an indicator of their male competence. However, it could also have a completely different cause: Perhaps the female companions simply spoke so much that the men were forced to fill their plates one after the other.