Hungry men prefer fat women, says new study

Empty bellies, fuller figures
A hungry man prefers a bigger woman: study
ANDREW CHUNG (from TORONTO STAR)

Everyone knows how alcohol affects a man's judgment of a woman's attractiveness, but what happens if he's hungry?

It turns out that a hungry man views the female form through yet another sort of prism, this one telling him subconsciously that the woman with a little — or a lot — more flesh is more attractive than the one with less.

A new study, published in the current British Journal of Psychology, concludes that hungry men prefer heavier women more than do men who have just eaten.

Hungry men also pay less attention to a woman's body shape, even preferring a less curvaceous form compared to satiated men.

Lead researcher Viren Swami, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool, says the phenomenon stems in large part from primitive impulses that relate to times of food shortage: Partners best able to guarantee the survival of offspring would be those who were plumper and thus had access to resources.

"At a very basic level," Swami says, "if you're feeling hungry, in context of resource scarcity, the preference seems to be for someone who has potential resources, and body weight appears to be a good predictor of that. In other words, if you're able to put on body weight, it means you have access to food and wealth."

Swami and co-researcher Martin J. Tovée recruited male college students either entering a campus cafeteria hungry or exiting full. Overall, 61 students were asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 photographs of women of various weights in tight grey leotards. The women's faces were not pictured.

Though the differences were small, the hungry men rated as more attractive the heavier figures than did the men whose bellies were full.

Researchers for years have known that there were differences in how societies view body weight and attractiveness. In the South Pacific and rural South Africa, for instance, overweight or even obese figures are considered more attractive and are associated with greater riches or prestige.

In recent times, studies have begun to show that these differences may have less to do with ethnicity and more to do with socioeconomic status. A study last year by Swami and Tovée, conducted in Britain and Malaysia, suggested that those in richer settings preferred lower female body weights, and those in poorer settings preferred higher weights.

But what was going on inside the person to signal this lack of resources (or lower socioeconomic status), and thus affecting preference for partners? That's what this study tried to tackle.

The exact physiological mechanism underpinning hungry men's preferences isn't clear. But, Swami hypothesizes, blood-sugar levels could give the individual a sense of being deprived of food and hence threatened physically, "and that may lead to preference for something like heavier body weights or more mature partners to remedy that threatened situation."