To Your Health: Men overeat to impress women, study suggests

Is stuffing your face the new strutting?

Men eat far more when dining with women than when they're eating with other men — leading researchers who made the discovery to offer this evolutionary explanation: they're binging to impress.

The Cornell University study looked at 105 men and women's eating habits at an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet over two weeks. Men snarfed down about one and a half more slices of pizza and nearly two and a half more small bowls of salad when their lunch mate was a woman.

Interestingly, women ate the same amount no matter the gender of their dining companion. But, perhaps in an empathetic reaction to watching their dining partners pig out, the women who ate with men reported feeling that they had overeaten, too according to the study, published in the journal, Evolutionary Psychological Science (tinyurl.com/q74srys).

So, what's a man's gluttony got to do with impressing a woman? The study's authors suggest that men overeat as a show of strength — that they can consume an unhealthy amount of food and live to tell about it.

Perhaps that explains why participants at eating contests are almost always men.

"To Your Health" offers quick doses of health news several times a week.