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If you're addicted to food-focused Instagram accounts like ours, you're definitely not alone. The deliciously addictive images are so enticing you can't look away ... or help yourself from scrolling through more. In particular, the beloved "cheese pull" shot—you know, the one where cheese-packed sandwiches and pasta start melting and oozing all the goodness. Like so:
Turns out, we are hard-wired to love those gooey strands. Quartz reports that advertising and marketing agencies discovered that there's something very particular about the cheese pull that hijacks our brains into hunger, thirst, arousal, and desire modes. It essentially draws you in and totally drives you out of your right mind.
Cheese can especially "trigger deep-seated memories of food experiences" and "signal an enjoyable experience in you," a professor at Harvard Business School pointed out—which, in turn, leads to a release of chemical in your brain that's not unlike a drug addiction.
"The chemicals that are released in the brain often are released before we get a bite of a food," Kevin Hogan, who studies the psychological triggers behind marketing and advertising, told Quartz. "It's hooking up to the same drug as street drugs … That addiction becomes activated and you want that pizza."
And the same goes for a sweat-beaded bottle of soda, beer pouring from the tap, a burger sizzling on the grill, and chocolate or caramel drizzles.
TLDR: Looking at food photos (and worse yet gifs!) is just as addictive as eating. And there's nothing you can do about it.
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