Apparently, there’s a new way to impress your date these days: overeating. In a study conducted out of Cornell University, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, researchers found that men tend to eat significantly more when they’re dining with women.
The study focused on 133 adults (74 males and 59 females), according to The Telegraph. The subjects went to an all-you-can-eat Italian buffet multiple times, with researchers recording diners’ gender, the genders of the people they were with, and the amount of food they consumed. After the observation, each participant was asked to complete a survey, asking questions about how full, hurried, and comfortable they had felt during their meal.
The results were dramatic, at least in terms of the men. The study found that while women generally ate the same amount no matter the gender of their dining companions, the case wasn’t the same for men. Instead, men ate 93 percent more pizza and 86 percent more salad when they dined with the opposite gender. That’s almost twice as much as they would eat with other men!
So what does it mean? That men overeat in order to get the ladies, apparently. According to the study, their “observation of men ‘eating heavily’ is sensibly viewed as an evolutionary perspective as men ‘showing off.’”
Though it might not make much sense at first, there are a number of reasons men could be eating to show off. Eating spicy food, for example, might be a way that people show they have a higher pain tolerance, says Kevin Kniffin, the lead study author and a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University. Kniffin told The Atlantic that “overeating might function as a comparable kind of signal that a person is healthy enough that they can engage in unhealthful behavior of excessive eating (and still end up okay).”
While we usually look toward manners and how well dressed a guy is, apparently there’s a new way to be impressed.