Cluttered and chaotic environments can cause stress, which can lead us to grab more of the indulgent snacks -- twice as many cookies according to this new study! 
 
 Conducted at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and published in Environment and Behavior, the study shows that cluttered kitchens are caloric kitchens. When stressed out females were asked to wait for another person in a messy kitchen -- with newspapers on the table, dishes in the sink, and the phone ringing -- they ate twice as many cookies compared to women in the same kitchen when it was organized and quiet. In total they ate 53 more calories from cookies in 10 minutes time. 
 
 "Being in a chaotic environment and feeling out of control is bad for diets. It seems to lead people to think, 'Everything else is out of control, so why shouldn't I be?'" says lead author Lenny Vartanian, PhD., now Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia. "I suspect the same would hold with males," he adds. 
 
 Half of the 98 females participating in the study waited in a cluttered kitchen with scattered piles of papers and dirty dishes, while the other half waited in an organized kitchen. Both kitchens had bowls of cookies, crackers, and carrots. Some of the participants were asked to write about a time when their life was out of control and others were asked to write of a time when they were in control. The latter group entered the cluttered room feeling in control and ate about 100 fewer total calories than those who felt out of control before entering. 
 
 "Although meditation, as a way of feeling in control, might be one way to resist kitchen snacking for some, it's probably easier just to keep our kitchens picked up and cleaned up," said coauthor Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by Design. 
 
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 The study was coauthored by Kristen Kernan, BNY Mellon, and it was self-funded by the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. ||||| 
 
 Sonja Puzic, CTVNews.ca 
 
 
 
 
 
 When your kitchen sink and counter are stacked with dirty dishes, you are more likely to indulge in unhealthy snacks, according to a new study. 
 
 The study conducted at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in Ithaca, NY, found that cluttered kitchens cause stress and lead women to consume more calories. 
 
 Half of the 101 female undergraduate students who participated in the study were asked to wait for another person in a kitchen scattered with dirty dishes and newspapers, with a ringing phone in the background. The other half waited in a clean, organized kitchen. 
 
 Both kitchens had bowls of cookies, crackers and carrots. The students who entered the messy kitchen ate twice as many cookies as those in the tidy kitchen. They consumed 53 more calories from cookies in just 10 minutes, the study found. 
 
 Interestingly, a messy kitchen and a chaotic environment did not make the women eat more crackers or carrots, the study noted. 
 
 Researchers also asked some participants to think and write about a time when their life was out of control, while others were asked to write about a time when they felt totally in control. 
 
 The students who focused on being in control and then went into the messy kitchen ate about 100 fewer calories in total than those who felt out of control before entering, the study found. 
 
 "Being in a chaotic environment and feeling out of control is bad for diets. It seems to lead people to think, 'Everything else is out of control, so why shouldn't I be?'" the study’s lead author, Lenny Vartanian, said in a news release. 
 
 "I suspect the same would hold with males," the associate professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia added. 
 
 Study co-author and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, Brian Wansink, said that while meditation can help curb snacking in a messy kitchen, there is a simple solution to the problem. 
 
 “It's probably easier just to keep our kitchens picked up and cleaned up,” he said. 
 
 The study was published this week in the Environment and Behaviour journal. ||||| A Cluttered Kitchen Can Nudge Us To Overeat, Study Finds 
 
 Enlarge this image Katherine Du/NPR Katherine Du/NPR 
 
 Hunger is not the only reason we eat sweets. 
 
 Often we eat as a way to celebrate, or sometimes we reach for food when we're sad or bored. 
 
 And a study published this month in the journal Environment and Behavior points to another factor that can nudge us to eat: clutter. 
 
 "The notion that places — such as cluttered offices or disorganized homes — can be modified to help us control our food intake is becoming an important solution in helping us become more slim by design," report Brian Wansink of Cornell University and his colleagues in their write-up of the study. 
 
 "It's important to know whether a food environment can actually cause you to, unknowingly, overeat," Wansink told us. So, in order to examine how clutter and chaos can influence what — and how much — people eat, Wansink and his collaborators designed an experiment. 
 
 They set up two kitchens. One kitchen was neat and tidy. The other was strewn with mail, newspapers and dirty dishes. "It was a mess,'" Wansink said. 
 
 Then, they recruited women to participate in the study. 
 
 "We brought 100 people into [the] kitchens — just one at a time," he explained. The participants were given a writing assignment. Some were told to write about a time they felt out of control. Others were to write about a time when they felt in control. 
 
 The participants were also given snacks — including cookies, crackers and carrots. (The snacks were the same in both kitchens.) And all were told: "Feel free to eat as much as you want, because we have tons of this food." 
 
 Among women who wrote about feeling out of control, those in the messy kitchen tended to consume twice as many calories from cookies as women in the tidy kitchen. (Those in the messy kitchens averaged 103 calories worth of cookies.) 
 
 "We think we're smarter than the environment around us," Wansick said. "That's why these external cues are so powerful." We're often not aware that they're influencing our behavior. 
 
 In the cluttered kitchen, the scientists also found that women who wrote about a time when they felt in control consumed fewer calories from cookies (averaging 38 calories) than did the women who wrote about a time when they were out of control. 
 
 "The results suggest that an individual's mindset can moderate the impact of a chaotic environment on food intake, particularly for sweet foods," the authors write. A chaotic environment didn't significantly impact consumption of the carrots or crackers. 
 
 So, how might these findings translate to a messy desk? After all, many of us do a lot of snacking at the office. 
 
 "This study makes a lot of connections to workplace environments," Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, who has studied how messy desks or rooms can influence behavior, told us. 
 
 "Messy rooms are, sort of, enabling people to break free from what's expected of them," she said. 
 
 A few years ago Vohs published the results of an experiment that placed participants either in a messy setting with papers and office supplies scattered throughout, or in a clutter-free room. She found that people in the orderly room were more inclined than those in the messy room to choose a healthy snack — an apple. 
 
 "The results confirmed the prediction that an orderly environment leads to more desirable, normatively good behaviors," she and her co-authors write in their study published in Psychological Science. 
 
 The authors of the "cluttered kitchen" research admit that, though it certainly seemed as though writing about an event when they felt out of control made the participants feel more stressed, their study didn't directly measure that. 
 
 "It will be important for future research to determine the specific emotional or cognitive mechanisms through which these conditions can impact people's food intake," they conclude. ||||| Lenny R. Vartanian, Kristin M. Kernan and Brian Wansink (2016). Clutter, Chaos, and Overconsumption: The Role of Mind-Set in Stressful and Chaotic Food Environments. Environment and Behavior. doi: 10.1177/0013916516628178 
 
 foodandbrandlab@cornell.edu 
 
 Cluttered and chaotic environments can cause stress, which can lead us to grab more of the indulgent snacks-- twice as many cookies according to this new study! 
 
 Conducted at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and published in Environment and Behavior, the study shows that cluttered kitchens are caloric kitchens. When stressed out females were asked to wait for another person in a messy kitchen -- with newspapers on the table, dishes in the sink, and the phone ringing – they ate twice as many cookies compared to women in the same kitchen when it was organized and quiet. In total they ate 53 more calories from cookies in 10 minutes time. 
 
 “Being in a chaotic environment and feeling out of control is bad for diets. It seems to lead people to think, ‘Everything else is out of control, so why shouldn’t I be?’” says lead author Lenny Vartanian, PhD., now Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “I suspect the same would hold with males,” he adds. 
 
 Half of the 98 females participating in the study waited in a cluttered kitchen with scattered piles of papers and dirty dishes, while the other half waited in an organized kitchen. Both kitchens had bowls of cookies, crackers, and carrots. Some of the participants were asked to write about a time when their life was out of control and others were asked to write of a time when they were in control. The latter group entered the cluttered room feeling in control and ate about 100 fewer total calories than those who felt out of control before entering. 
 
 “Although meditation, as a way of feeling in control, might be one way to resist kitchen snacking for some, it’s probably easier just to keep our kitchens picked up and cleaned up,” said coauthor Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by Design. 
 
 The study was coauthored by Kristen Kernan, BNY Mellon, and it was self-funded by the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. ||||| Abstract 
 
 Order and disorder are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that each environ confers advantages for different outcomes. Three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention—and that both settings can alter preferences, choice, and behavior. Experiment 1 showed that relative to participants in a disorderly room, participants in an orderly room chose healthier snacks and donated more money. Experiment 2 showed that participants in a disorderly room were more creative than participants in an orderly room. Experiment 3 showed a predicted crossover effect: Participants in an orderly room preferred an option labeled as classic, but those in a disorderly room preferred an option labeled as new. Whereas prior research on physical settings has shown that orderly settings encourage better behavior than disorderly ones, the current research tells a nuanced story of how different environments suit different outcomes.
– Research has already suggested that people in neat work environments are more likely to opt for a healthy snack than people in cluttered ones. "Messy rooms are, sort of, enabling people to break free from what's expected of them," one researcher from that 2013 study tells NPR. Now a new study out of Cornell University finds a similar effect in kitchens—namely, that people tend to eat more in cluttered ones than orderly ones. "Being in a chaotic environment ... seems to lead people to think, 'Everything else is out of control, so why shouldn't I be?'" says lead author Lenny Vartanian in a press release. To test this, his team introduced 101 women, one at a time, into a messy or tidy kitchen, and asked some to write about a time when they felt in control and others to write about a time when they felt out of control. The same snacks were available in both kitchens: cookies, crackers, and carrots. Those in messy kitchens who wrote about feeling out of control ate 103 calories' worth of cookies, double what their clean-kitchen counterparts with the same writing assignment ate. Those in the messy kitchens who wrote about being in control ate just 38 calories of cookies. "The chaotic environment had no impact on consumption of crackers or carrots," the researchers write in the study, published this month in Environment and Behavior. While certain practices such as meditation may help get us in an in-control mindset, just picking up after ourselves could go a long way, co-author Brian Wansink tells CTV News. (Guys, meanwhile, overeat in the presence of one type of person in particular.)