Your eating habits may be influenced by what the people in your online social circles are saying about food
Islamabad (Pakistan Point News / Online - 21st February, 2020) Your eating habits may be influenced by what the people in your online social circles are saying about food. Getty ImagesOur eating habits may be influenced by our friends' food habits and preferences, including our online friends.The authors of a new study think that their work could also be used to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables and less high-energy-dense snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages.
Only 12.2 percent of American adults ate the recommended servings of fruit, according to the CDC. Only 9.3 percent ate the recommended servings of vegetables.If you've been on social media lately, you might have noticed a few posts about food okay, a lot of posts about food.Online friends influence our eating habitsAlix Timko, PhD, a researcher at PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and a clinician-scientist in the Eating Disorder Assessment Treatment Program at CHOP, pointed out that the new study doesn't look directly at how social media affects people's eating habits.
Instead, researchers examined how different types of social norms affect people's consumption of certain foods.These social norms also exist in other situations, such as in the real world among university students or co-workers.But researchers focused on social media because these sites now make up a large amount of our social interactions.Nudging social media users toward healthy eatingSocial norms such as these have played a part in many public health campaigns such as "don't drink and drive" and teen anti-vaping campaigns where behaviors are identified as being what most people do.
The authors of the new study think that their work could also be used to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables and less high energy-dense snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages."The implication is that we can use social media as a tool to �nudge' each other's eating behavior within friendship groups, and potentially use this knowledge as a tool for public health interventions," said Hawkins.
