NEW DELHI: Can healthy foods be made desirable if they are visually presented in tempting ways like burgers, desserts and other indulgent foods on social media? The answer is an overwhelming ‘yes.’
A study by the Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Nutrition (ICMR-NIN), Hyderabad, found that food looks can meaningfully influence adolescents’ willingness to eat it.
To test whether adolescents are hooked on “foodporn,” a term generally associated with highly attractive images of unhealthy foods on social media, researchers explored whether the same visual techniques commonly used to make indulgent foods look desirable online could also make healthy foods more appealing to adolescents.
The findings, published in BMC Public Health, found that adolescents identified colour, texture, presentation, shape, glossiness, balance and symmetry as features that made food images attractive and memorable.
According to Dr SubbaRao M Gavaravarapu, Scientist G, who led the research team, “The way healthy food was presented also appeared to influence the setting in which adolescents imagined eating it.”
“While healthy foods shown regularly were more strongly associated with eating at home, attractively presented healthy foods showed a relatively greater association with restaurants and social settings, including eating with friends. This suggests that visual presentation may help healthy foods enter some of the social contexts more commonly associated with indulgent foods”, Dr Gavaravarapu added.
Dr Bharati Kulkarni, Director, ICMR-NIN said, “Our researchers suggest that visually appealing healthy food content could be further explored as a nutrition communication strategy on social media and in other food environments such as school canteens, cafés and restaurants.”
“Larger and longer-term studies across more diverse adolescent populations will be important to understand whether such approaches can lead to sustained changes in food choice and consumption,” she added.
For the study, “Foodporn for e-Priming Healthy Food Choices Among Adolescents: An Experimental Study Using Appealing Food Imagery,” the researchers created a pool of 150 food images across healthy and unhealthy food categories.
They pretested these images with 43 school-going adolescents, who rated them according to their liking.
Their responses were used to select 15 images for the study, including healthy foods such as fruits, millets, pulses, dairy products, nuts, and seeds, presented either simply or in a more visually appealing manner.
The selected images were then shared over 15 days on Instagram with 203 adolescents aged 13 to 19 years from across India.
The researchers assessed participants’ responses to three types of food imagery: visually appealing unhealthy foods, healthy foods presented in an attractive “foodporn” style, and healthy foods presented more simply.
Participants were also randomly divided into two groups: one group received brief nutritional descriptions along with the food images, and the other viewed the images without this additional information.
In-depth interviews with 19 adolescents followed this to understand how they perceived and responded to food imagery.
For some healthy foods, attractive presentation appeared to make a substantial difference.
Visually appealing images of millet porridge and chana salad, for instance, generated greater willingness to consume the foods than their less attractively presented counterparts, with significant differences observed for the millet and pulse categories.
Researchers said the experience went beyond simply liking an image for some participants.
Adolescents reported trying foods they had previously disliked, increasing their consumption of fruits and pulses, and even experimenting with cooking and plating food differently.
“These qualitative observations complemented the overall positive trends seen in attitudes, consumption and intentions towards healthy foods,” the researchers said.
Interestingly, adding short nutritional descriptions to the Instagram posts did not result in significant differences between the two groups.
Adolescents often paid greater attention to the food image than to the accompanying text, highlighting the importance of visual communication in digital food environments, the researchers added.
