Money handling influences BMI: a survey of cashiers

Abstract

Money is a recent phenomenon in the evolutionary history of man and therefore no separate brain centre to handle money is likely to have evolved. The brain areas activated by food reward and money reward are extensively overlapping. In an experimental set-up, hunger was demonstrated to influence money related decisions and money related thoughts to influence hunger. This suggests that the brain areas evolved for handling food related emotions are exapted to handle money and therefore there could be a neuronal cross-talk between food and money. If this is true then attitude and behavior related to money and wealth could influence obesity. We conducted a survey of 211 individuals working as full time cashiers in order to test whether ownership over the cash, the amount of cash handled per day and the duration of cash handling work affected their body mass index (BMI). Cashiers who had ownership over the money had a significantly higher age corrected mean BMI than salaried cashiers. The BMI correlated positively with duration of service as cashier even after correcting for age and duration of sedentary job in males. Among salaried cashiers of both sexes, bank cashiers whose mean daily cash handling was one or two orders of magnitude greater than that of shop cashiers, had a significantly higher BMI. The effects of amount of money handled per day, years of service as cashier and ownership over the money handled could be shown to influence BMI independent of each other. The results support the exaptation hypothesis and suggest that the changing economy and attitudes towards money may be a contributing factor to the current obesity epidemic.