New research published this week suggests that people who want to reduce the amount of unhealthy food they consume should buy their groceries via safe shopping online rather than heading to bricks and mortar stores, according to the Daily Mail.

Scientists at the University of Albany came to this conclusion as a result of examining people’s retail habits and finding that we are much more likely to stock up on junk food when encountering it in supermarkets. Conversely, the ability to search specifically for only the items we need when using the web to place an order eliminates a lot of the unhelpful, unhealthy temptations.

A wide range of people participated in the study, some of whom were considered to be very impulsive when it comes to making purchases. But when given the opportunity to harness safe shopping online with a fixed budget and the requirement that the items they selected were at the healthier end of the spectrum, all involved made similarly sensible choices regardless of their personality type.

Spokesperson, Jaime Coffino, explained that the participants stuck firmly to the nutritionally balanced nature of the task at hand in every case. Conversely, if they had been sent to a shop with the same budget, there would have been far greater variations in this respect.

While the conclusions made by researchers in this case have yet to be subjected to review by other scientists in the same field, there is now a compelling argument in favour of online shopping being a good way to break bad food buying habits.

Some experts have previously claimed that people who shop online are losing out on the physical activity involved in visiting real world stores, thus leading a more sedentary lifestyle. But impulse buys are less prevalent on the web, which may rebalance things.