Social networks decide your diet

There has been much talk about how celebrities influence our (less) healthy behaviors, but a new study of the Aston University (United Kingdom) finds guilty much closer to us to the disaster that our diet has become: our Facebook contacts.

Apparently, the social networks They make you eat the same as your friends. That can be good, if they like to upload images of fruits, vegetables and avocado toasts to their Facebook wall, or fatal if your contacts are those with the fridge with an echo but lined with junk food service phones.

These scientists proved that people ate a extra portion of fruits and vegetables every day if they thought their peers on Facebook were doing the same. But also that, by virtue of our ability to blend in with the environment, the consumption of little or no healthy food increased by a third in those people whose contacts preferred this type of food.

This study suggests that our social media partners may influence us more than we can consciously recognize when choosing certain foods. But it has not been the only time that science has proven the importance of the environment in our diet. Another study published in March 2019 and conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California(USA) already warned that the social circle may be the reason why some people suffer overweight, or what is the same, that you can be obese by "social contagion."

To do their analysis, researchers studied hundreds of families of US military because they cannot choose where they live. The data revealed that if they moved to a military base with a high obesity rate, increased your risk of getting fat. For every percentage point increase in the local obesity rate, the chances of a person suffering overweight or obesity increased by up to 6%. And the longer they lived there, the more likely they were to gain kilos.

Now that you know, reflect on whether you're having croissants for breakfast because you think it's what others are eating for breakfast … and make a storie with a tomato toast, your diet will thank you.