Cutting down on household chores behind obesity in women

Modern women do less housework which may be responsible for them adding on kilos, a new US study has claimed.
According to research published in the journal PLOS One, in 1965, the average American women spent nearly 26 hours per week on chores like cooking, cleaning and doing the dishes. Women today allot about half that time for chores.
"What we were trying to find is what has changed in our environment that has led to obesity," study leader Edward Archer, a researcher at the University of South Carolina, told the New York Daily News.
He added that what changed was that more women went to work at sedentary jobs and fewer engaged in physical activity - like housework.

For the study, researchers looked at the time and amount of energy women expended on "household management" over a 45-year span.
Non-working women spent 33.1 hours per week on housework in the 1960s, compared to 16.5 hours in 2010. Working women spent 17.1 hours on housework in the 1960s, compared to 10.4 in 2010.

By 2010, women were devoting 25 per cent more time to "screen-based media use" - watching TV or on the computer.
Archer pointed out that sedentary activity is up among men, too.
"The take-home message isn't that women should be doing more housework. It's that how we spend our day determines what our body does with the food we eat," he said.