Men eat more pizza when trying to impress women, study suggests

Men ate 93 percent more pizza in the presence of women.

In the study, his team secretly observed 105 adults having their lunches at an all-you-can-eat Italian buffet over the course of two weeks. The study’s authors suggest that men overeat as a show of strength – that they can consume an unhealthy amount of food and live to tell about it. However, women reported that they felt “rushed” and like they overate when they were in the company of a man. Researchers didn’t find any data to support these feelings.

After looking at existing (and totally depressing) research that suggests eating disorders in women can in a few ways be attributed to females competing for men, researchers at Cornell University wanted to work out whether the opposite was true for guys. Instead, researchers suggest that men eat more around females simply because they can, or more specifically, to show the lucky lady that they can eat whatever they want, and still look this good.

An explanation of the findings can be traced to an evolved tendency to show off to the opposite sex, according to Kevin Kniffin, visiting assistant professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and lead author of the study, which as published November 10 in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.

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.

By overconsuming food, men unconsciously may be signaling their biological fitness, a paradoxical tactic in this case given that “overeating consistently is going to produce a body shape research shows tends to be viewed as unattractive”, Kniffin explained.

Kniffin said the findings fit with other examples of self-handicap behavior, where in this case men are showing off their fitness through excessive eating.

Pigging out at meals would seem more of a turnoff than an attractive trait, but the researchers say evolution may have programmed men this way. In particular, men are more likely to overeat when they’re eating their food in front of women.

Kniffin says this study could present a new slant on the way men participate in disordered eating, which is something that isn’t often documented. So are men willing to eat double their normal intake of pizza just to impress us?

In contrast, women ate the same amount of foods, whether they dined with women or men.