How can you avoid over snacking?

Washington D.C : If you want to stay slim, you may want to keep your kitchen clean as a new study suggests that a messy kitchen can make you eat more.

Cluttered and chaotic environments can cause stress, which can lead us to grab more of the indulgent snacks, nearly twice as many cookies according to this study.

Conducted at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, the research 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.

Lead author Lenny Vartanian from the University of New South Wales said that 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?,' adding "I suspect the same would hold with males."

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.

The study is published in Environment and Behavior.