The objective of advertising is to arouse our desire to obtain what it shows us, it does not matter if it is clothes, a car, or the dream vacation destination. However, a study has now found that in the case of food it could have the opposite effect and that when we see images of food, especially if we do it repeatedly, we can experience a feeling of satiety, a finding that could be taken into account. account when designing a weight loss plan.
In fact, the Internet is full of advertisements for food products that have been uploaded to the network in order to attract the attention of consumers so that they purchase them. His intention is that, when we see a photograph of a hamburger on social networks such as Instagram or Facebook, we get hungry and feel like eating one from Burger King or McDonalds, for example, but the research -which has been carried out at the University of Aarhus (Denmark) – has revealed that seeing the same image of food more than 30 times can trigger a feeling of satiety.
“In our experiments, we showed that when participants viewed the same food image 30 times, they felt more satisfied than before they had seen the image. Participants who were shown the image multiple times also chose a smaller portion than those who had only seen the image three times, when we later asked them what portion size they wanted,” said Tjark Andersen, who recently defended his PhD at the Department of Food Sciences at Aarhus University.
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Andersen explained that while it may seem strange that study participants felt full without having eaten anything, it is quite natural because the way we think about food greatly influences our desire to eat: “Your appetite is more closely related to your cognitive perception than most of us think,” he says.
“Images of different types of food do not have the same effect on satiety. That’s why you can feel full after the main course, but still have room for dessert.”
The theory of grounded cognition explains it. For example, if you imagine sinking your teeth into a juicy apple, the same areas of the brain are stimulated as if you actually took a bite of an apple. “You will receive a physiological response to something you have only thought about. That is why we can feel completely satisfied without eating anything, ”he adds.
Previous studies had already shown that we can feel satisfied just by looking at images of food, but the new work analyzed the number of viewings needed and whether the variation in the images eliminated the feeling of satiety. “We know from previous studies that images of different types of food do not have the same effect on satiety. That is the reason why you can feel full after the main course, but still have room for dessert. Sweet things are a completely different kind of food,” says Tjark Andersen.
Andersen and his team recruited 1,149 people to conduct experiments online. First they showed a picture of orange M&Ms. Some of the participants were shown the image three times and others 30 times. When asked how many M&Ms they wanted, between 1 and 10, those who had seen 30 images ordered less than others.
Then they repeated the experiment, but this time the M&Ms they showed were of different colors, and the result did not change. Eventually, they substituted Skittles for the M&Ms, which, unlike M&S, taste different depending on the color. “If color didn’t play a role, it must be imagined flavor, but we didn’t find any major effects here either. This suggests that more parameters than color and taste need to change before we can have an effect on satiety.”
The results have been published in Science Direct and, in Andersen’s opinion, could be useful in developing methods to control appetite and lose weight. He gives the example of developing an app based on a Google search for pizza: “You open the app, choose pizza, and it shows lots of pictures of pizza while you imagine eating it. This way, you could have a feeling of satiety and maybe stop wanting pizza.”
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