London - You’ll probably consider the very question bizarre. But it’s not as daft as it sounds: is your kitchen making you fat?
A growing stack of scientific evidence says it is not silly at all. If you’re overweight, the reason could be down to the way your kitchen is organised.
The suggestion is that by making a few small changes - to the layout, where you keep your food, the type of plates and glasses you use, the sort of fridge you have - you could knock centimetres off your waistline.
Best of all, adherents say, you won’t have to suffer the groaning feeling of deprivation associated with traditional dieting.
The man who is at the forefront of the ‘slim kitchen’ movement is Dr Brian Wansink, an academic at Cornell University in New York state.
A former executive director of the U.S. government’s Centre for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, he now runs Cornell’s Food and Brand Laboratory, where he has spent the past five years investigating what people eat - and why.
He outlines his theories in a new book, Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions.
And the results of his studies are astonishing.
‘I used to have a problem with my weight, but by implementing just a few of these changes, I’ve lost about 25 lb (about 11kg) in five months,’ he says.
Moving your food and fridge around may sound like the ancient Chinese art of feng shui, but there’s nothing mystical about it. Dr Wansink bases many of his recommendations on a study of households he carried out inSyracuse.
More than 200 householders were recruited and every aspect of their kitchens - what dishes they use, where the sink is, how the fridge is arranged, plus dozens of other minor details - was photographed and logged, alongside their body weight.
What was special about the slim people’s kitchens? How did they differ from the fat people’s kitchens?
Dr Wansink, who says he is commissioned by celebrities to ‘fat proof’ their homes, has come up with a list of recommendations - some simple (and free) to implement, others more costly.
His MAIN advice is to make your kitchen less ‘loungable’. The room where you cook needs to be functional, but not somewhere you want to linger.
If you have a TV in the kitchen or soft-backed chairs around the counter or a central island, get rid of them.
Dr Wansink says people who remove these comforts from the kitchen spend on average 18 minutes less there each day - and this means that you’re much less likely to snack on crisps, biscuits and leftovers.
Next, consider the layout. Your goal needs to be to steer your mind away from calorific ready-meals and towards home-cooking using fresh vegetables.
‘People cook more vegetables if it’s easy and fun to do so,’ he says. So, your fridge door should swing open directly towards the sink and work surfaces (so it’s easy to grab a handful of salad leaves and wash them).
‘If you’re renovating, put bright halogen spotlights and overhead music speakers 1m away on each side of the sink’ because, apparently, this will encourage you to wash and chop vegetables.
Oh - and repaint the room if it’s the ‘wrong’ colour.
‘Bright colours seem to agitate us and cause us to eat too quickly and too much. Dark colours cause us to linger, eat longer and look for more,’ says Dr Wansink. So, go for a neutral beige in between.
You also need to get rid of clutter on work surfaces.
Obviously, snacks should not be sitting in plain sight, ready to tempt you. But nor does a collection of gadgets and chopping boards work in your favour.
‘We found that people ate 44 per cent more snacks if the space was cluttered, compared to a clean environment.’ (Why? He doesn’t know for sure, but suspects that ‘if a place looks chaotic, you’re more likely to think “What the heck”’ and start munching away.)
Now, open your fridge. Modern fridges have one thing in common: a big, opaque crisper drawer at the bottom to hold your vegetables and keep them fresh.
There’s a fundamental problem with this, say the ‘slim kitchen’ experts: vegetables are the healthiest foods in the fridge, but the drawer keeps them out of sight. According to Dr Wansink’s research, you are three times more likely to eat the first food you see compared to the fifth.
‘Rearrange your cupboards and fridge so the first foods you see are the ones that are good for you,’ he says.
This means putting ready-meals and other nasties in the crisper drawer (it will feel odd at first), and placing salads, green veg and tomatoes at eye level on the open shelf in your fridge.
‘Your vegetables might keep longer in the crisper, but the goal is to eat them, not compost them,’ says Dr Wansink.
As for leftovers? Wrap uneaten broccoli in clear clingfilm so you can see it, but hide that slice of unhealthy cream cake in aluminium foil. Even though you know what’s inside, if you don’t see it when you open the fridge, you’re less likely to go for it.
Tempting, high-calorie foods should be ‘invisible and inconvenient’. Make sure biscuits, snacks and breakfast cereals (even so-called ‘healthy’ ones are laden with hidden sugar) are not on open shelving or behind glass doors. Put a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter.
Next, go to your cupboards and look at the plates you eat from. What colour are they? It matters.
Consider this fascinating experiment: Dr Wansink invited 60 former Cornell students to a free lunch - and didn’t let them know the event was, in fact, an excuse to use them as guinea pigs in his research.
Without making any announcements, he gave half of them red plates and half white plates. Then, he offered the choice of two types of pasta: one in a red (tomato-based) sauce and the other in a white (cheese-based) sauce.
The diners served themselves - but after they’d done so, their plates of food were weighed.
The results were surprising. The people who chose food that was the same colour as their plates piled on bigger portions than those whose food did not match the colour of their crockery. Significantly bigger, in fact - on average, they piled on 18 per cent more calories than the other diners.
Why? Dr Wansink believes it is because if the food is ‘camouflaged’, our brains do not know when to stop adding more.
So, choose plates that contrast with the colour of your food.
It’s not realistic to have lots of sets of different coloured plates for different coloured meals, so Dr Wansink recommends non-white plates ‘since white starches - pasta, rice and potatoes - are the big diet-busters’.
His own dinner plates? ‘They are light blue.’
You should also make sure your plates are not too wide. It won’t astonish you to learn that the bigger your plate, the more you will put on it.
But it may surprise you to learn that a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine revealed that even the most aware and informed diners - nutritional scientists - fall into the trap of eating more just because they’re using a big plate. Just like the rest of us.
Dr Wansink recommends your dinner plates should be not more than 25cm wide. But, he says, it’s important not to go too small: once you go below 24cm, ‘people begin to realise they’re tricking themselves and go back for seconds and thirds’.
One of his key recommendations (which, he says, caused him to lose kilos) is never to place serving dishes on the family table for diners to help themselves. Instead, divide out portions on the kitchen worktop and put them on people’s plates.
The reason is obvious: you’re much more likely to go for seconds if the food is right in front of you and doesn’t involve a trip back to serving bowls in another room.
‘On average, serving food in this way decreases how much people eat by 20 per cent,’ says Dr Wansink. ‘And for men, it works even better than that, because we’re the ones who are the most guilty when it comes to second and third helpings.’
Dump your large serving spoons, too: the study found that the scientists served themselves 14 per cent more ice-cream when they were given a 3oz (85ml) spoon instead of a 2oz (56ml) spoon.
Even these highly educated food experts counted the number of spoons they served, not the amount of ice-cream.
So - no TVs; no big, white plates; no serving dishes at the table; no clingfilm on your fattening leftovers... this is all very well. But isn’t there a simpler answer to losing weight?
Wouldn’t we all be better off if we invested in a bit of self-discipline? If, instead of putting the snacks out of sight, we simply left them on the supermarket shelf?
‘It would be great if we could do that,’ says Dr Wansink. ‘But if we could, we wouldn’t be where we are today. I think humans have a need to misbehave a little.’
Daily Mail