If you’ve been struggling with weight management, better get back into the kitchen and make your man a sandwich or at least clean the bathroom floor—because, according to a new study, obesity is caused by a lack of housework.
Sponsored by Coca-Cola, the Public Library of Science study was designed to examine the increased prevalence of obesity among women, and particularly how it correlates to the decrease in household management over the past five decades. Their findings in lay terms: You’re fat because you don’t spend enough time cooking, cleaning or doing laundry.
But wait, it gets better.
The researchers at PLOS imply that this increase in sedentary lifestyles is primarily due to watching too many Real Housewives marathons (or some other guilty-pleasure television show) and couldn’t possibly be related to working at a computer all day, despite the fact that the last few decades have seen more than a 30 percent decrease in physical activity at work (a drop from 50 percent in 1960 to less than 20 percent in 2011).
The study continues to insult women (specifically targeting “stay-at-home” moms) by reporting that they rely too heavily on modern conveniences such as pre-packaged microwaved meals, restaurant food, dishwashers and disposable meal containers. Apparently the luxury of foregoing dish-scrubbing, bread-kneading, cow-milking and land-plowing has made us all overweight and spoiled.
It’s a shame PLOS couldn’t find a better way to spend Coca Cola’s unrestricted grant—like, say, researching the ever-present wage gap, dwindling options for reproductive health care or maybe even the adverse health effects of drinking soda!
Maybe I should get off the computer and clean something? I can feel the fat depositing with every stroke of the keyboard.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user harryleemartin via Creative Commons 2.0.
