No joke: next time you eat a medium sized square of chocolate try to find something to make you laugh for 10 to 15 minutes and it'll help you burn off the calories. ABC News reports:
Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, recruited 45 pairs of friends, shut them in a room decorated like a cheap hotel scientifically known as a metabolic chamber played them comedy clips on a TV screen and measured how many calories they burned when they laughed.
The researchers separately tested seven pairs of male friends, 17 pairs of female friends and 21 mixed couples.
"We didn't tell them that the goal of the study was to measure laughter, because then they might have forced it and forced laughter is regulated by a totally different part of the brain. We wanted it to be genuine laughter," said the lead researcher, Maciej Buchowski, director of bionutrition at Vanderbilt.
The participants were shown various things, starting with staid landscapes and working up to comedy video clips. The result?
They burned 20 percent more calories when laughing, compared to not laughing," Buchowski said.
"Then we calculated what would happen if somebody laughed for 10 or 15 minutes a day and we found that it was up to 50 calories, depending on your body size and the intensity of the laughter."
That means that if you laugh for 10-15 minutes a day, you'd burn enough calories to lose two kilograms (4.4 pounds) in a year, Buchowski said.
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