This result opens up all sorts of possibilities. Dr Viren Swami of University College London and Dr Martin Tovée of Newcastle University found that before they eat dinner men find heavier set and less curvy women more attractive.

How full a man's stomach is can dictate the type of woman he will fancy, UK research suggests.

A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated.

The hungry men also paid much less attention to a woman's body shape and regarded less curvy figures as more attractive.

The molecular mechanism by which this works might be manipulable some day. Could a drug target brain locations which govern attraction without affecting whether a person feels hungry? If so, a guy could (knowingly or not) take a drug that makes his skinny or fatty mate look more attractive all the time.

I've long thought that a drug which increased the range of men or women which a person finds attractive would allow a person to be a lot more satisfied when pursuing the opposite sex. Also, a drug or other treatment that allowed a mind to find a single person the most attractive (say stare at that person while getting the treatment to imprint that shape as ideal) would allow everyone to think their mate is most attractive.

Biotechnological manipulation of feelings of attraction might not cause natural selection problems. In the future people will genetically engineer their offspring anyway. So hooking up with a person who is less attractive due to genetic problems doesn't have to lead to genetically less fit offspring. That will be able to get fixed with genetic engineering at the time of conception.

Male students entering and exiting a school dining hall were shown pictures and women and asked to rate them.

They recruited male university students as they entered or exited a campus dining hall during dinner time.

They asked the men to rate how hungry they were on a scale of one to seven. Using these responses, the researchers selected 30 hungry and 31 satiated men to take part in the study.

The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 women of varying weights, all within a healthy range, who had been photographed wearing tight grey leotards and leggings.

Skinny women should want to go out to dinner with men since the men will find them more attractive as dinner progresses. Heavier set women might want to go bicycling with a guy to build up his appetite in more ways than one.