Food & Drink

Science sez: Your brain treats food porn like regular porn

These ice cream holes are NSFW
These ice cream holes are NSFW

You there, carefully arranging your burger or pizza or fried chicken sandwich so that it captures the light just perfectly and really makes your food pop for your Instagram post. Sure, you jokingly call it food porn, but it turns out that according to neuroscientists you’re nothing but a common pornographer, getting people’s brains hot and bothered and conditioned to easy joyless fucking. Err, eating.

Over at the Science of Us, where they’re better able to understand complicated scientific data, they relayed what Charles Spence from Brain and Cognition found when studying what “intense food imagery” does to your brain. Turns out that unlike real pornography which can at least provide relief and release, all food porn does to your brain is make it hot and bothered and desperate for you to put high-fat food in your mouth. As an example, a 2004 study found that participants brains got a huge metabolism boost when confronted with pictures and smells of delicious food, as opposed to when they were just lying back and talking about boring stuff like their friends and family without food stimuli. There was also another study that showed participants were much quicker to locate a small target on a screen if it was on the same side as high-fat food, which attracted attention from fat-horny brains.

So why is this bad? All this sweet, salty porno is constantly overloading your brain, which still hasn’t completely evolved past the era when we were chasing wooly mammoths down for dinner. Overloaded and excited, food porn is causing you to be hungry more often, and you reward yourself with food that’s bad for you. Which of course, from a brokester’s perspective is bad since that shit is usually expensive, as is getting your arteries scraped by a heart doctor when your crappy insurance doesn’t cover it. So just remember next time you’re at Roberta’s or Shake Shack and snapping pictures of what you’re eating, you’re no better than the owners of the Bangbus.

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