What do you accidentally have in common with the Very Mary Kate character from College Humor? You both get full staring at photos of food. That’s right. Whether you realize it or not, those foodie friends of yours on Instagram who post photo after photo of their amazing meals might actually be doing you a favour. As it turns out, seeing multiple photos of food could curb your appetite for the real deal, at least according to a new study at BYU.
“In a way, you’re becoming tired of that taste without even eating the food,” said study coauthor and BYU professor Ryan Elder. “It’s sensory boredom – you’ve kind of moved on. You don’t want that taste experience anymore.”
232 people took part in the study, half of which looked at 60 photos of sweet food while the other half looked at 60 images of salty delights (giving each photo a rating for how appetizing it looked). At the end of the study, every participant was given salty peanuts to eat and rated the taste experience. The participants who had looked at images of salty food enjoyed the peanuts significantly less, even though they actually hadn’t seen a photo of peanut in all the salty food images. It turns out that if your eyes over-indulge in images of foods from the same taste region, your excitement level for the taste sensation will drop dramatically. So the Very Mary Kate sketch about being stuffed from staring at pictures of bagels isn’t so much of a joke after all. With that in mind, we’re going to start following some bakeries on Instagram immediately.