Daily Competition: Exercise Vs Cooking Dinner

What will you devote more time to today: exercising or preparing dinner? According to researchers at Ohio State, whichever you choose will be done at the expense of the other. An Ohio State news release reports that the researchers analyzed data on more than 112,000 Americans who had reported their activities for the previous 24 hours. Of those, 16 percent of men and 12 percent of women reported that they had exercised on the previous day. Men spent, on average, almost 17 minutes preparing food, compared to an average of 44 minutes for women, while the average time spent exercising for the entire sample of adults, including those who did not exercise, was 19 minutes for men and nine minutes for women. The research showed that exercise and food preparation compete with each other for your time: a 10-minute increase in food preparation time was associated with a lower probability of exercising for 10 more minutes – for both men and women.