Health and diets: How Food Porn Is Actually Leading To Weight Problems

delicious cupcakes

You might not know it, but you’re watching food porn several times a day. Those delicious food pics in the restaurant menu or in the advertising on TV, in the menu at McDonald's are examples of food porn and if you don’t know how to stop it will eventually lead to serious weight problems.

Think about it for a moment: just how delicious the food looks in photographs! Since there’s no way of knowing what something will actually taste, food photos are a great way (for business owners) to sell product. Oftentimes buyers are disappointed to see that the delicious food pics are just art photography, since the real dish isn’t all that great to begin with.

The fast food industry is the one that takes full advantage of food porn. Take for instance McDonald’s, the world’s largest chain of fast food restaurants. It has roughly 68 million customers daily in 119 countries! Ask any of these buyers and you’ll know it was the deliciously looking food images in the menu that convinced them. Well, what they actually got is very different from the hamburger in the print.

                                          

cream donut

strawberry gem sandwich

The problem with food porn isn’t that it makes us think something will look just as great as in the picture some photographer spent hours setting up. The problem with food porn is that it is making us fat. Given the serious weight problems in America today, seeing a jam-glazed pork cooked just the right amount will make life a lot harder for anyone on a diet.

“Like the sexual kind, food porn allows us to lust after taboo things” psychologist Susan Albers told Women’s Health. “And now it’s on our terms: We can search for exactly what turns us on,  enlarge the images, and linger for as long as we want” the author of Eating Mindfully explained of the multitude of websites featuring food porn.

But the more we stare at those delicious food photos the more we crave to actually eat it. Ph.D. Deirdre Barrett with the Harvard Medical School Behavioral Medicine Program, explains that food porn activates an instinct to eat: “Food porn relies on a phenomenon called supernormal stimuli, which exaggerates qualities we’re already hardwired to love”.

It’s obvious people with weight problems that are on a diet are the most vulnerable to the drawbacks of food porn. The moment we look at that delicious chocolate cake we imagine how it’s going to taste. Soon, it will turn into a craving that will hunt you into actually eating a piece of delicious chocolate cake, much like the one you’ve been drooling over online, in a recipe book or in a restaurant menu.