Do people think the food you’re eating is healthy? Depends on your weight

Instagram/amylouisewatton

This is a picture of pancakes I randomly pulled off Instagram. Snapped by Amy Watton, a travel and food blogger, the image is just one of many food posts featured on her feed – Amy really seems to like ice cream! After a quick scroll, I can tell that Amy is young, thin and stylish. Aside from food posts, she posts a lot of pictures of her outfits and travels, which have her hiking through monuments and frolicking on the beach.

Why am I telling you this? Because it only took a quick scroll though Amy’s life for me to decide that this pancake she posted above is probably a healthy pancake – likely made with specialty flour and organic berries. Had Amy been overweight, I may have seen things differently.

ALSO SEE: Diet pills contain no silver bullet for weight loss – and can pose serious health hazards

Cornell University recently released a study suggesting that overweight health bloggers are perceived as less reliable than thin bloggers.

“When we search for health information online, there are a lot of related cues that can bias our perceptions in ways that we may not be consciously aware of,” Jonathon Schuldt, assistant professor of communication and lead author of the study tells Science Daily. “The study revealed that when a blogger is overweight, as shown in the blogger’s photo, readers are far more skeptical of the information that blogger provides when compared with a thin blogger’s recommendations, even when the content is exactly the same.”

Using 230 subjects, researchers presented identical images of 10 meals, ranging from pancakes to quesadillas to chopped salad. For half of the group, the picture included a thumbnail of an overweight blogger and the other half had a thumbnail of the same blogger after she had lost a significant amount of weight. Participants were then asked to rate how healthy they thought the meal was on a scale of one to seven. Interestingly, meals shown next to the overweight blogger were perceived as less healthy than those shown next to the thinner blogger.

“People appear to assume that if a heavier person is recommending food, it is probably richer and less healthy,” Schuldt says.

ALSO SEE: Why losing weight as you age is brutally hard (but what you can do about it)

In a second experiment, researches included information on the amount of fat and calories each dish contained to see if that would sway subjects, but again, they found that people continued to be more influenced by the body image of the blogger than the food’s nutritional information.

“awareness of these biases could help us better navigate health information online,” Schuldt says. Like anything, we shouldn’t judge something based solely on the person recommending it when there are many other factors to consider. While some might argue that they wouldn’t buy an outfit that looked amazing on a blogger who had a completely different body shape than them, this study suggests they might consider it over an outfit modelled by a blogger with a less desirable body shape. The reality is, who we get our information from matters.

Would you be less interested in a recipe if it was recommended by someone you considered overweight? Let us know by tweeting @YahooStyleCA.