by ian

Men think food as much as sex

Daily Mail

RUMOUR has long had it that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And it turns out that it’s true. Men spend more time thinking about food — and sleep — than they do about sex, a study shows. They think about all three more often than women do. The research found that, contrary to popular wisdom, men do not think about sex every seven seconds. In reality, it is more like once every waking hour. The study was carried out by professor Terri Fisher, a psychologist at the Ohio State University in the US. She asked 163 students — male and female — to carry around a chart and mark it every time they thought about sex, food or sleep. The numbers varied widely, from one student who only recorded one sexual thought a day to a male who wrote it down 388 times in 24 hours. But on an average, men thought about food and sleep more often than they thought about sex. And they thought about all three more often than women did. Fisher said: “ Men are more aware of need- related states such as being hungry or tired or sexually aroused, and focus on those. They are also better at detecting these states in themselves than women and more willing to express their thoughts.” She said even the student who thought about sex 388 times a day was only thinking about it every 158 seconds — far fewer than ‘ every seven seconds’ that myth would suggest. “ When people hear about some of these differences, I think sometimes they don’t question it because it fits the stereotypes we have of men and women,” Fisher said. Behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings, author of How To Have Great Sex , explains why men are so preoccupied with their stomachs. She said: “ There tend to be more trigger mechanisms to thinking about food. The sights and smells associated with eating, as well as simple hunger or thirst, tend to be more commonplace in everyday life than the trigger mechanism for thinking about sex, so inevitably we think more about it.”