This is your brain on food porn (and how it can promote healthier eating)

Food porn is all about posting and engaging with photos of desirable and stylised food on social media. And those digital images can do real things to our brains. Researchers are now digging below the surface level of social media trends and are exploring how the sharing of food porn images can influence the food choices we make. In this podcast, I look at how that influence can help nudge us in the direction of better food choices.

Links referred to in the podcast

• Can food porn prime healthy eating? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01139-w
• Association between indulgent descriptions and vegetable consumption: twisted carrots and dynamite beets https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2630753

Episode transcript
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Transcript

Food porn is all about posting and engaging with photos of desirable and stylised food on social media. And those digital images can do real things to our brains. Researchers are now digging below the surface level of social media trends and are exploring how the sharing of food porn images can influence the food choices we make. In this podcast episode, I’ll look at how that influence can help nudge us in the direction of better food choices.

Heard about food porn? If you haven’t, then just to stop your mind from going into some very dark places, I’ll explain what it means. It is a popular term you’ll see used across social media and cooking shows and it is all about the glamourised visual presentation of food. It often takes the form of food photography with styling flair that presents food provocatively. Not too dissimilar to the way glamour or pornographic photography present humans.

Whether you are a foodie or not, the trend of snapping your food and uploading delicious and drool-worthy pictures to social media, especially Instagram, has hit almost everyone. It seems everywhere that we go, it is now natural for people to snap pictures of the food they are about to devour.

But food porn as a term has not just arisen with the advent of social media. You can trace its roots back to articles from the 1970s that mentioned food porn. Back then, the phrase was used in a literal sense and described food that was unhealthy. The term morphed with the rise of social media to a new meaning where food porn was used to describe food that was presented and prepared in an aesthetically appealing fashion.

Social media platforms like Instagram, which had its start primarily for photo sharing, were tailor-made to propagate the food porn trend. On Instagram alone, there are currently 290 million posts using the food porn hashtag – that’s a lot of porn. Add to that communities interested in food and nutrition, then hash-tagging pictures as food porn allows people to connect on many things to do with the food such as culture, presentation, preparation, taste, and anything else that adds to the authenticity of the meal.

But food porn doesn’t just exist in the social media world. Nutrition researchers are now looking at this phenomenon to ask the question if foodporn can be used to nudge people towards healthier food choices. And that was the topic of a recent commentary review about food porn and eating which I’ll link to in the show notes. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01139-w

To start with, there is already research to show that looking at digital images of food can affect us – but under opposing directions. The first way is by ‘visual hunger’ - where looking at pictures of desirable food can trigger the desire to eat, even if we’re not hungry. So, that appears obvious enough. But what is less obvious is that in some people, looking at digital pictures of food can create a feeling of satiety and fullness without actually eating food. So, some complex brain effects are going on here that’s for sure. And is best summed up with the saying: “We eat first with our eyes.”

And to show the power that food presentation can have on our perceptions of food, one simple study offered the same sample of brownies to volunteers, but they were presented in three different ways. All that was done was the brownie was put on either a Bone China plate, a paper plate or a napkin. Simple. Yet when asked to rate the flavour, volunteers scored the brownie presented on the China plate as ‘excellent’, the one on the paper plate as ‘good’ and the one on the napkin as only ‘okay’. And when asked how much they would pay for each brownie, then compared to the one on the napkin, they would be willing to pay 50 percent more for the one on the paper plate and a whopping 240 percent more for the one on the China plate. Yes, we really do eat with our eyes.

So, what about food porn itself – can it be used to nudge people to healthier food choices? The context for this question comes from the way we evaluate and compare ourselves against other people. I mean, social media as a whole is a perfect example of this by giving snapshots into the often perfectly curated lives of other people. This can be harmful when those comparisons create a negative self image. And already there is research to show that continual engagement with food porn images can create not only unhealthy eating behaviours, but also influence a more negative body image perception.

But it is not all bad news here. As your peers on social media can also influence you by nudging you to consume extra food, be it unhealthy or healthy. One study conducted in the UK could show that people ate an extra portion of fruit and vegetables for every portion they thought their social media peers ate.

So, although food porn can be stigmatised because it involves glamorising, glorifying and idealising unhealthy foods in a way that is unattainable in reality, it might also have a positive potential in influencing food choices if healthy foods are presented as alluringly and glamourous as unhealthy foods. So social media influence combined with healthy food porn does have merit in being able to promote healthier food messages.

And there is evidence to support this idea. One recent study in adolescents found that including healthy food porn in nutritional messages could create favourable associations because they were seen as pleasurable and pro-nutritional images which got their attention. And positive nutritional images were also found to prompt more positive food choices compared to nutritional messages that didn’t use appealing images.

Saying that, there is only a small amount of research in this area looking at how positive food porn images can influence healthy eating. But it is a good place where it is going.

But just to show how many different factors can influence our food choices, even the way food is described can influence our choices. In a study conducted in a university cafeteria at Stanford University, each day a vegetable dish was featured on the menu and depicted in one of four different ways. The vegetable dish was described as either basic (for example just as simply ‘carrots’), described with a health restrictive narrative (for example ‘carrots with sugar-free citrus dressing’), a health positive narrative (for example ‘smart-choice vitamin C citrus carrots’) or finally with an indulgent description (for example ‘twisted citrus-glazed carrots’). The choice of vegetable was rotated between beetroot, butternut squash, carrot, corn, courgette, green beans, and sweet potato.

Over the study period, more than 8,000 diners choose some form of the vegetable dish. Watching how many people selected a dish and weighing how much remained at the end of the meal time gave a good estimate of how much each person was likely to be eating.

The clear menu winners were the indulgently described vegetables. Sizzlin' beans, dynamite beets, and twisted garlic-ginger butternut squash wedges were loaded up on plates 23 percent more by weight than the more plainly described vegetables. The seductively named vegetables were selected by 25 percent more people compared with the basically labelled fare. The least popular choice was the Puritan healthy restrictive labelled vegetables. And I’ll link to this study in the show notes. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2630753

So, let’s wrap all this up. How food looks and is described is one of many important factors that influence what we choose to eat. And with social media such an integral part of many of our lives, then it can be used for positive purposes when it comes to food. If you follow me on social media, then you’ll know I’m clearly a nutrition scientist rather than a foodie so don’t expect me any time soon to be sharing glorious and stylised food creations from my kitchen. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do your bit here in the type of images you share and also the types of content you engage with.

So that’s it for today’s show. You can find the show notes either in the app you’re listening to this podcast on if it supports it, or else head over to my webpage www.thinkingnutrition.com.au and click on the podcast section to find this episode to read the show notes.

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I’m Tim Crowe and you’ve been listening to Thinking Nutrition.