It's your classic money shot, the camera tight to reveal every detail of steamy cinnamon buns drizzled just so. Jam-glazed pork falling off the bone. A slice of buttery-crusted apple pie letting it all hang out. Sweet or savory, slow baked or flash fried, it's food porn--and experts say it's whetting our appetites in ways we never imagined. "Like the sexual kind, food porn allows us to lust after taboo things," says psychologist Susan Albers, Psy.D., author of Eating Mindfully. "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."
Just a few short years ago, food sites were predominantly recipe-driven. Now, a growing number shamelessly flaunt the fact that few people visit for the articles. FoodPornDaily.com (tagline: Click, drool, repeat.) stripped away recipes altogether in favor of luscious panned-in shots. Food images are also the fastest-growing category on the hugely popular inspiration-board site Pinterest, where they generate 50 percent more re-pins than fashion and style photos. If you don't find anything that turns you on there, you can log on to Flickr's Food Porn Group. Boasting nearly 600,000 images, it's one of the most active categories on the photo-sharing site. (Search: Food photography)
Problem is, that Flickr group isn't the only thing that's growing. Photos seem harmless, but they provoke a real emotional and physical hunger response that can be tough to control, says neuroscientist Laura Martin, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center who studies how we respond to food. And straight out of the insult-meet-injury department: Those who are overweight appear to be more sensitive to the effect of viewing irresistible food. Does that mean you can never ogle your cake without eating it too? Not necessarily. There are savvy ways to curb your appetite--online and in real life.
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Eating with Our Eyes
The best food porn plays on the fact that the more indulgent a photo appears, the more likely it will trigger our instinct to eat. "Food porn relies on a phenomenon called supernormal stimuli, which exaggerates qualities we're already hardwired to love," says Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program and author of Waistland: The Revolutionary Science Behind Our Weight and Fitness Crisis. Usually, that translates to visual cues that a food is high in calories--things like pooling oils and the sheen of sugar--which were coveted assets back in hunter-gatherer days, when calories (particularly the gooey, fatty ones) were harder to come by, says Barrett. That might explain why, according to a recent study from 360i, a marketing firm that studies online trends, pictures of desserts are the most likely to be shared online. Cheesy, oozy comfort foods also get favorited more frequently on sites like Food Gawker.
