Digital Smarts - Pictures of Food May Be Stimulating Your Appetite

According to a new study in the journal Brain and Cognition, food imagery could be making you eat more. The study, which is really more an amalgamation of prior studies, links viewing images of food to bodily changes, such as increased salivation and (possibly) increased hunger. It goes on to say that "regular exposure to virtual foods might well be exacerbating our physiological hunger more often than needed, due to the array of neural, physiological, and behavioral responses linked to seeing food. The researchers place blame for our increased exposure to stylized images of food on the variety of digital screens that surround us every day, as well as "embellishing technologies" like Photoshop and Instagram.

The study also notes that we're "spending more time looking at virtual images of appetizing foods and paying less attention to the actual foods being consumed."