In 2015 it has become increasingly rare to eat anything without taking a mandatory picture first. It’s pretty easy. First you make your food look mouth-wateringly delicious. Then you angle your camera to ensure that you capture your food from the best possible angle (because you know, you wouldn’t want your chicken to look too fat or anything) and then finally you share it on social media to make your friends jealous or I don’t know – let the world know that you’re eating three meals a day. This is called food porn.
According to The Oxford University study, sharing snaps of our beautifully laid out food is making it harder for us to resist eating. Scientists in the Brain and Cognition journal have found that the rise of celebrity chefs and television shows around food have made us food obsessed and as a consequence it’s not doing any favours to Britain’s already existing obesity crisis.
Researchers say ‘regular exposure to virtual goods nowadays’ is ‘triggering hunger more often than is perhaps good for us.’
So basically when we scroll through our instagram feeds and ogle at scrumptious looking meals (like the greatest looking homemade pizza in the world or a chocolate cake that you would definitely skip mains for), it’s telling our stomachs we’re hungry, when actually we just really fancy something that looks half as good as what we’ve seen and so this creates ‘visual hunger.’
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Pictures: @Grilledcheesesocial, @Davidwma.
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.