It looks like Instagramming your food has major HEALTH benefits

It looks like our foodie pics might be a bit more helpful than just making our Instagram feeds look good.

It turns out that taking pictures of your food can actually make you healthier.

Research carried out at Oregon State University claims that snapping your food can improve your health and can even help people with diabetes.

The study was carried out on 114 nutrition students in the US and Australia. They had to identify the foods that were in the pictures, as well as figure out their serving sizes and weight.

The students were able to identify different foods, with an 80 per cent success rate. However, when it came to serving sizes, only 38 per cent of the students were able to give an estimate that was within 10 per cent of the actual weight.

"Dietary intake information is important both to individuals using nutrition-based therapy for conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, and to entire populations for identifying nutrition and disease risk," the study said.

The research further claims that by using photography as a means of understanding food, it could help people in the first stages of diabetes come to terms with their dietary changes.

Mary Clusky, one of the authors of the study said: "If you're providing me with your dietary intake information, you may not be trying to falsify the information, because you're sincerely interested in improving your diet.

"But I'm depending on your ability to recall what you ate and your ability to correctly tell me what portions and specific ingredients you had; there are all kinds of things that can make it go wrong.

"Images can facilitate your recall, and they also prompt important questions from a dietitian: 'Was that low-fat dressing or high-fat?' Plus, images make dietary assessments more entertaining because people do like to take pictures of food."

So, there you go. Time to start snappin'.