Step away from the smartphone. Before you post another Instagram picture of your awesome entree, consider what you're doing to your friends' taste buds. You may be wearing them out, even if they never take a bite of the thing.
That's according to a study from Brigham Young University's School of Management that's been doing the rounds Monday. The study took 232 students and asked them to rate pictures of food by how tasty they looked. Half were given pictures of sweet treats, the others looked at salty snaps: a whopping 60 Instagrams' worth of each.
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At the end of the experiment, the participants were given peanuts (the snack, not the metaphorical poor payment). The ones who had been looking at salty snacks, across the board, reported enjoying the peanuts less.
This fits with established theories on satiation. "You’re becoming tired of that taste without even eating the food,” said professor Ryan Elder, who co-authored the study. “It’s sensory boredom. You’ve kind of moved on. You don’t want that taste experience anymore.”
"Even I felt a little sick to my stomach during the study after looking at all the sweet pictures we had," added co-author Jeff Larsen. He suggests that you might actually turn this study to your advantage — by looking at dozens of pictures a day of chocolate cake if you have a weakness for it, for example.
The study's authors caution that you really have to look at a large amount of pictures of a certain food before you get turned off by it. You're going to have to sign up to an awful lot of food feeds to get that effect, of course. But nobody said dieting was supposed to be easy.
Image: Instagram, Futurechris