14 DAY TRIAL // Do you think that the folk concept that boys must be stout and girls must be graceful does not affect you?
It does, as scientists have found a subtle bizarre difference between men and women and their eating behavior.
A new study investigated how young men and women who perceived their bodies as being less than "ideal" ate different food amounts after watching images of "ideal-bodied" people of their own gender.
"In the presence of same-gender peers, certain women eat less and certain men eat more following exposure to ideal-body images -- 'certain' in this case referring to women and men who have discrepancies between their actual body and the kind of body they think their peers idealize," said lead researcher Kristen Harrison at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The researchers randomly put the 151 male and 222 female subjects of average height and weight to be tested in same-gender groups of 3 to 9 people. Some were randomly put to watch slides of images of fit men and women that had no accompanying text, some viewed slides that contained diet- and exercise-related text, some viewed slides that contained irrelevant text, and the control groups did not view any slides.
The subjects completed questionnaires that revealed discrepancies between their actual body type and the body type they thought to be ideal for their gender before watching the slides.
After that, they went to a second room where they completed a follow-up questionnaire; but in the same room, there where pretzels and the participants' consumption was unobtrusively measured. The real goal of the study was not revealed (they were all told the study was about evaluating the appeal of the magazines' layouts).
The women saw pictures from Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue, Shape and Elle and the men from Men's Health, Men's Fitness and Muscle & Fitness. The study took 16 weekdays, with 45-minute afternoon group sessions at 4:30, 5:15, 6 and 6:45 p.m. -- times when the subjects "are typically starting to feel hungry for their evening meal, but are unlikely to have already eaten".
Exposure to ideal body images with no text or paired with body-relevant text drove women with body-related discrepancies to eat, on average, one less pretzel than other women, and men with body-image problems ate, on average, three more pretzels than the rest of the men. "Abstinence from just a few pretzels a day -- amounting to about 100 calories -- can result in the loss of more than a pound of fat during the course of a year, and the addition of a few pretzels a day can do the opposite, which doesn't sound that significant."
"However, if people are viewing "ideal-body media" regularly, their body-weight and health could be significantly affected," said Harrison.
"If a woman is a regular user of ideal-body media such as fitness and fashion magazines, not to mention television programming featuring advertisements for diet foods and products, she may be moved to abstain from eating several times a day -- even when she is hungry -- resulting in significant weight loss over time."
"But the fact that this happens even to skinny women means that such weight loss could be unhealthy," Harrison said. "Similarly, a man who is vulnerable to ideal-male images due to the presence of an actual body vs. ideal body self-discrepancy may be moved to eat even when he is not hungry, just to reassure himself and other men that he is sufficiently masculine."
Harrison recommends people to eat when they're hungry, not based on what they see in the media. "Eating in response to external cues rather than internal hunger signals is one of the first steps involved in the development of disordered eating, be it anorexia, bulimia or compulsive eating. Our commercial mass media are filled with such external cues."
"It is our hope that future studies will be devoted to furthering our understanding of how young people, especially those who are most vulnerable, can resist the pull of those cues."