How food influencers affect what we eat
Original resource: BBC Future. Published on 6 December 2021. Written by Jessica Brown.https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211206-does-seeing-food-on-social-media-make-us-eat-more
Vocabulary
cue (noun): a signal for someone to do something
incline (verb): have a tendency to do something
misfiring (verb): fail to produce the intended result
nudge (verb): to prod gently, typically with one's elbow, in order to draw their attention to something
ooze (verb): (of a fluid) slowly trickle or seep out of something
sway (verb): move or cause to move slowly or rhythmically backward and forward or from side to side
Article
It is hard to browse through social media without coming across a banquet's worth of mouth-watering posts, but do these actually alter your own food choices?
Certainly, it appears we're hugely influenced by other people – especially those closest to us – when it comes to what we eat. Research has found that the closer and stronger two people's connection, the more sway they have over each other's food choices. Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned that food-related content on social media is making us think differently about food. Social media algorithms promote content that users engage with more, so viewing more unhealthy food means seeing more of it on our social media feeds, says Ethan Pancer, professor of marketing at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
One study estimated that children and adolescents see marketing for food between 30 and 189 times per week on social media apps, with fast food and sugary drinks being the most common. But it's not just advertising placements from the food industry that are responsible – we're all capable of influencing people online.
"When we think of advertising, we think of industry trying push a product, but influencers can work in the same way," says Patricia Cavazos, professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis, Missouri, US. "Content on social media from peers is very influential, in terms of impacting what we feel is relevant and appealing, and social norms of how to behave."
But while studies have found that social media can make us think differently about food, and that we typically engage more with content featuring unhealthy food, it's uncertain yet whether this actually translates to our changes in our behaviour in daily life. Research has found that that these influences can include level of nutritional knowledge, body ideals, cooking skills and cost.
And while researchers can relatively easily isolate possible influences on social media to see how it affects our diets, there's much more going on in real life that these studies can't look at, says Suzanne Higgs, professor in the psychobiology of appetite at the University of Birmingham, UK. "It's possible for some people in certain situations that social media could be the predominant factor that influences their behaviour, but it's only one factor," she adds.
The amount of influence social media has on us also varies by individual, says Melissa Atkinson, a lecturer in psychology, at the University of Bath, UK. "There's a lot of individual difference in terms of how we respond to social media images, in terms of our own biological and psychological processes," she says. Some people have a higher reward response to food cues, for example, where the brain sends out pleasure signals after seeing certain foods, Atkinson says. These people are more likely to respond to food cues no matter where they see them.
But even without definitive answers, researchers are looking at ways to make social media influence our diets in positive ways. Tessitore, for example, has found a way to make healthier food seem more exciting on social media. She created two Twitter pages that were identical apart from one detail – one had 23 followers, while the other had more than 400,000. Both accounts published the same tweet about eating healthy food. She showed participants to one of the two accounts, and when asked afterwards how likely they were to eat a salad, those who saw the account with more followers were more inclined to want to eat a salad.
While the findings don't reflect reality, where we're typically exposed to multiple streams of information, images and tweets, we'd still notice and process how many followers a Twitter account has, Tessitore says, so it's likely to have the same effect. But at the moment, we're a long way from being able to nudge people towards healthier diets with posts about salads and steering people away from the powerful pictures of oozing protein.
"We're fighting years of evolution here," says Pancer. "There's a reason we've evolved to look for calorie-dense food in food-scarce environments. But eating what feels good is misfiring – we now need to find ways to recalibrate this."
But ultimately, when we click off social media and go back into real life, the many influences on what and how we eat are still much stronger, experts say.
Discussion
1) What do you think about this topic?
2) Have you ever had this experience before with food on social media?
3) Do you think we are inclined to do things that we see on social media?
4) Have you ever been nudged to eat healthily?
5) When you were young, what were the predominant influences with the way you used to eat?
Extra Resources
Vocabualry Practise: Wordwall