You NEED to stop Instagramming your food, and here’s the reason

Our Instagram feeds would feel incomplete without a stylised snap of our superfood salad, or a table flat lay shot of Sunday brunch, mimosas included.

But according to new research, we shouldn't actually be snapping photos of our food before we dig in.

As well as the social faux pas of making our food go cold and preventing everyone at the table from eating in the pursuit of the perfect picture, a study has shown that paying too much detail to the appearance of our food makes us enjoy the overall experience less. 

Overexposure to food, brought on by looking at it for ages to create that gorgeous picture, leads to pre-satiation.

The study established 'sensory simulations as an important mechanism underlying satiation, and provides behavioural evidence that simple evaluations can produce sensory-specific satiety.'

This basically means that you're bored of the food before you even start eating it, and where's the fun in that? 

'When we Instagram, we inherently must focus our attention on the item in the picture, even for that very brief moment,' the paper's co-author Professor Joseph Redden told The Independent. 

'This can have a range of effects on later enjoyment.'

So essentially, spending so much time 'gramming your food means that you're taking less time to enjoy it, which can ultimately lead to you not getting as much satisfaction from the meal as you could have.

And we'd much rather eat the perfect meal at it's best than get a few extra likes on Insta.