The Color Of Your Food Can Influence What You Eat
SHARE
Unsplash
It turns out, there’s a reason people love Italian food so much (beyond it being totally delicious). According to a study from the International School for Advanced Studies, vision is the primary sense we use to guide our food choices. As a method for evaluating calorie intake, we rely on a “color code” that suggests reddish natural foods, like tomatoes, are more likely to be nutritious and green foods tend to be low in calories. The neuroscientist who coordinated the study, Raffaella Rumiati, says some theories suggest “our visual system evolved to easily identify particularly nutritious berries, fruits and vegetables from jungle foliage.”
Rumiati notes how humans are “visual animals,” so we rely on the color of our food to guide us, whereas dogs, for example, follow their keen sense of smell in order to decide what to eat. Red and green are the main colors we can identify. Unfortunately, this remains true even when it comes to judging processed foods or cooked foods, where color can no longer be a reliable indicator of calories. All of this information goes to show how deeply rooted these colors might be in our brain and according to this study, these ancient mechanisms might’ve been a part of our visual system long before cooking was introduced.
You’d think that if our brains can distinguish red and green so clearly, this would apply to other objects as well, except this study suggests that the color code of our visual system only activates properly with food. Historically, green foods have been perceived as safer with less of a chance of being poisonous. Since reddish foods have been shown to stimulate our appetites, it makes perfect sense that restaurants and food-related brands often use red tones to appeal to our visual senses. So next time you’re about to eat something, pay attention to the color. Maybe we should actually use appetite-suppressing colors like gray and blue for packaging so we’re forced to focus on the food itself.
Next on
