For better or worse, your food choices and eating habits are influenced by your social media friends and feed, British researchers report.
Polling nearly 400 college students, they asked them to estimate how much fruit, veggies, snacks and sugary drinks their Facebook friends ate each day. The participants that said their social media friends ate the recommended five daily portions of fruits and vegetables ate one extra serving.
But, they also indulged on an extra portion of unhealthy snacks or sugary drinks for every three portions they felt their online friends were consuming.
“This study suggests we may be influenced by our social peers more than we realize when choosing certain foods,” said study co-leader Lily Hawkins, a doctoral student in health psychology at Aston University in Birmingham, England. “We seem to be subconsciously accounting for how others behave when making our own food choices.”
These findings suggest that online social networks do indeed play a part in people’s eating habits; therefore, it could be possible to use social media to encourage healthy eating, the researchers say.
Related: Social Media and Your Mental Health: How to Protect a Healthy Body Image
“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,” Hawkins said in a university news release.
In terms of next steps, the researchers plan to follow people over time to see whether social media influence on eating habits has an effect over the long term on weight gain.
The study was published Feb. 6 in the journal Appetite.
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