The commonly held view that fat people are lazy has been turned upside down by a new psychology study which revealed that junk food is making us lazy.

Researchers from the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) conducted the study in 32 rats which were placed in 2 diet groups for 6 months.

Group 1 were fed healthy unprocessed foods and Group 2 were fed lower quality processed foods with added sugars.

The rats in Group 2 became obese after three months whereas the other group’s weight remained healthy.

During the study the rats were given simple physical tasks to undertake. Those being fed junk food took breaks twice as long as those who were put on a healthy diet.

Aaron Blaisdell who led the study has said that these findings suggest that a junk food diet can result in laziness. He also switched the rat’s diet for 9 days and demonstrated that this didn’t have any short-term impact.

“Overweight people often get stigmatized as lazy and lacking discipline. We interpret our results as suggesting that the idea commonly portrayed in the media that people become fat because they are lazy is wrong. Our data suggest that diet-induced obesity is a cause, rather than an effect, of laziness.”

Blaisdell also added “the highly processed diet causes fatigue or the diet causes obesity, which causes fatigue.”

Rats have a very similar physiological systems to humans therefore scientists strongly believe that the findings of this study are applicable to humans.

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