That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: If it ever strikes you that there is more going on between the sexes than meets the eye, you are right.
The latest evidence that we are not as much in charge of our own preferences as we might like to think comes in a delightful study from University College London and Newcastle University in the UK.
The researchers asked male university students on their way into lunch to rate the attractiveness of women of various shapes and sizes.
They asked students who had finished lunch to do the same.
What they found was that the hungry students were more attracted to heavier women than the students who were full.
What can this mean?
I don't suppose it means that when hungry we would like to have our women roasted and served up to us with potatoes, peas and gravy. If it meant that, there is no doubt that occasional cases of this type of behaviour would emerge. So far I haven't heard of any.
An evolutionary psychologist would probably say that we are programmed to be attracted to heavier women because they would survive longer if we were trekking across the tundra hunting mammoths.
Yet, why would the attraction diminish when we have had our lunch? Surely Mother Nature is not that shortsighted?
Perhaps the reason must remain in the realms of speculation. But at the very least, the findings seem to suggest, as one of the researchers proposed, that our food intake strongly influences our general state of mind.
I expect we have all found that we usually view the world more benevolently when we are full than when we are hungry. But if we have eaten more than we ought to of stuff that is bad for us we may experience anger and disappointment afterwards. If all we have eaten is one of those ridiculous salady things we feel a little current of virtue - which will, of course, be replaced shortly by hunger pangs. So our noble reason, whether we like it or not, is subservient, very often, to our stomachs.
But back to women. Do hungry women prefer heavier men? Alas we do not know. The search for this vital piece of information will be the next project undertaken by the research team.
What we do know is that there are lots of evidence that all sorts of underlying processes are going on when we are attracted to the opposite sex.
For instance, a Scottish study found that women with the greatest level of oestrogen are prettier than other women. The higher levels of oestrogen make these women more fertile than others so you can see what is going on from the point of view of perpetuating the species. But men do not go around saying, oh look at her, she must have loads of oestrogen, I'll marry her so I will.
Indeed, having lots of babies may be the very last thing on the man's mind. It might be the very last thing on the pretty woman's mind too.
But cunning old Mother Nature knows what she wants and has a way of getting it more often than not.
However, if that is so, and if we are attracted to the high-oestrogen women, why haven't all the other women become extinct? That, after all, is how evolution is supposed to work.
The answer, according to the researchers at the University of St Andrews, is that women confuse us poor men by using make-up. Make-up evens out the attractiveness levels of the women with high and lower amounts of oestrogen. All of which suggests that women, without consciously intending to do so, developed the art of make-up in order to bend the rules of evolution.
What chance do we men stand when faced with such an effortlessly clever gender? Perhaps the best thing to do at this stage is to go for a nice cup of tea and a lie down.
But by the way, if you are a larger lady and you want the men to stay keen, you know now what to do - keep 'em hungry.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.