It’s no secret that it’s a bad idea to go grocery shopping while hungry, for obvious reasons. However, one new study suggests you should also maybe stay away from dating apps on an empty stomach.
This is apparently because hunger can alter aesthetic preferences for human bodies.
In order words, it can significantly change the body type you are attracted to.
It may sound a little bizarre but hunger is a strong motivating factor since eating is one of our basic needs for surviving,
As a result, calorie deficits can negatively affect us quite a lot, including our attention, memory, cognition and even executive function.
Therefore, when people are hungry or fasting, they tend to be more attracted to food and have a bigger motivation to get food and eat.
There is also clear proof that being hungry can also affect our decision making and older studies have shown that it can even alter men’s appreciation of different women’s body types.
That being said, this new study by researcher Valentina Cazzato and her team, sought to try and replicate those same results and further expand on them.
The study featured 44 total participants, 23 men and 21 women and the average age was 23.7 years old.
The experiment involved computer generated pictures of bodies, faces and objects.
There were both male and female models, all wearing identical underwear posing in front of a plain background and different body types were pictured.
As for the faces, the same system was used, the male and female faces varying in roundness and all displaying a neutral expression.
The participants, who participated in the experiment online, were shown face, body and also object stimuli in different orders and were required to rate the images depending on their preferences.
To test the basic theory mentioned, there was a fasting condition, which meant the participants had to complete the test after fasting for over 12 hours.
There was also a snack condition under which the participants were required to complete the test right after eating a snack.
The results seem to confirm the previous research according to which people’s appreciation for human bodies can be altered by their level of hunger.
More precisely, the team observed that those with a higher BMI showed a preference for roundness when hungry while those with a lower BMI did not.
While participants with a high BMI preferred roundness in both conditions, the link was stronger when they were fasting.
