Those Who Cook Healthy Meals Are Less Likely to Exercise, Study Finds

A new research focusing on the eating and exercising behaviors of a total of 100,000 adults says that those who spend significant amounts of time cooking relatively healthy meals are unlikely to also dedicate some time to a regular fitness routine.

Interestingly enough, it appears that those who do exercise regularly tend not to spend all that much time in the kitchen, and settle instead for eating whatever cooks the easiest and fastest.

Both said behaviors (i.e. eating healthy and exercising regularly) are labeled by specialists as the key to living a long and satisfactory life.

Still, as this research shows, people have issues sticking to both these habits and prefer to dedicate their time to one while almost completely ignoring the other.

The researchers speculate that people's tendency to bid fitness routines their farewell when taking up healthy cooking can and should be linked to their lacking the time needed to engage in both these activities, Daily Mail reports.

“As the amount of time men and women spend on food preparation increases, the likelihood that those same people will exercise more decreases. The data suggest that one behavior substitutes for the other,” lead researcher Rachel Tumin commented on the findings of this investigation.

“There's only so much time in a day. As people try to meet their health goals, there's a possibility that spending time on one healthy behavior is going to come at the expense of the other,” said specialist went on to argue.

The volunteers whose behaviors were studied as part of this research were either married or single. As well as this, they were either parents or childless.

Despite these differences, they all manifested this tendency to replace one healthy behavior with another, rather than try to dedicate time to both cooking healthy meals and exercising on a regular basis.

As Rachel Tumin put it, “The findings should be used for authorities to consider changing the way they advise people to live more healthily, so they build in more tips on how to balance cooking and exercising.”