You could satisfy appetite just by looking at pictures of food, study says
You’ve heard of eating smaller meals, cutting out sugar, and taking regular walks to shave off the extra pounds.
But now scientists say that just staring at pictures of the foods you crave can help suppress appetite and boost weight loss.
Researchers in Denmark found that people who looked at 30 pictures of an M&M for at least two seconds per image and “lively” imagined eating the candy felt fuller and then wanted to eat less of the food.
They were compared to an equal group of people who were shown pictures of the same food just three times.
The scientists suggested that the action stimulated a part of the brain related to appetite and made someone feel like they had already consumed the food, boosting the feeling of fullness and possibly helping you lose weight with minimal effort.
The images above are from the first experiment. The first image is a photo of the orange M&M that the participants were presented with. They each had to look at this image for at least two seconds three or thirty times. After the experiment, the participants were then shown pictures of bowls with one to ten M&Ms in them (the second and third pictures show the bowls with one or ten M&Ms) and were asked to choose one to indicate how many M&Ms they wanted. The results showed that the participants were more satisfied and wanted fewer M&Ms when they viewed the photos 30 times
To vary the experiment, participants were then shown pictures of different colors of M&Ms (top left photo) and, to elicit a sweeter taste response, different colored Skittles (bottom left). After seeing these images three or thirty times, they were again shown the bowls of M&Ms or, in line three, Skittles, and asked to choose how many they wanted, from one to ten. The results of these experiments were consistent with those of the first experiment
PhD candidate Tjark Anderson, a university food scientist who led the research, said: ‘In our experiment, we showed that when the participants saw the same food picture 30 times, they felt more satiated than before they had seen the picture.’
He added, “You get a physiological response to something you’ve only thought about.
“That’s why we can feel completely satisfied without eating anything.”
In the study, published in the journal pullresearchers recruited more than 1,000 people who were divided into three groups for separate experiments.
In the first experiment, participants were shown an image of an orange M&M three or thirty times.
They had to look at each image for at least two seconds while “vividly imagining” themselves eating the food.
Then the participants were asked how full they felt and how many M&Ms they would like to consume.
The results showed that those who saw the photos just three times were significantly more likely to say they wanted to eat an M&M than those who saw them 30 times.
They also asked for more M&Ms, an average of 6.2 out of a possible 10, compared to an average of 5.7 in the group that saw the image more.
In the second branch of the study, scientists again showed the images of M&Ms three or thirty times, but this time the color of the candy varied.
This was to test whether seeing individual colors changed the brain’s response to the food stimulus.
But the scientists found no difference from the first, with results showing that people who saw the images just three times felt less full and wanted more M&Ms.
In the third arm, the M&Ms have been replaced by multicolored Skittles because they taste different in color and are sweet in taste.
But the results were still the same as in the previous experiment.
Discussing the results, Mr Andersen said: ‘If color wasn’t a factor, it must be imaginary taste [we thought]. but here too we found no great effect.’
Experts suggested that looking at pictures of food stimulated brain regions related to satiety or feeling full, reducing appetite. This is called grounded cognition theory.
Previous research has also suggested that repeatedly viewing an image of something can lead to habituation, or a weakened response to it, which reduces interest in the item.
It has also suggested that viewing images of food can be viewed as a form of gratification, or temporarily fulfilling one’s desire for food.
The researchers suggested that people who want to lose weight are repeatedly shown pictures of food to suppress their appetite.
Mr Andersen said an app could be developed to help curb cravings.
“Imagine you developed an app based on a Google search,” he said.
‘Say you wanted pizza. You open the app. Choose pizza and many pictures of pizza will be displayed as you imagine eating it.
“This way you could feel full and you might just not feel like pizza anymore.”
The average person saw about 6.1 food-related posts every 12 hours while using social media, a 2016 study found.