Fat Food Bloggers Get No Credibility

So you want to blog about healthy foods? Rule number one: lose those extra pounds. Researchers at Cornell University know this because they randomly assigned 230 people to one of two groups, both of which were shown pictures of the same ten meals– including black bean and cheese quesadillas, chopped salad with croutons, sliced beef with vegetables and so on. The Cornell Chronicle reports that each photo was accompanies by a thumbnail photo depicting the supposed author of the blog post. Participants were then asked to judge how healthy the meal was overall on a scale of one to seven. The only thing that differed between the two groups was the thumbnail photo of the blogger, which was a real picture of the same person before and after weight loss. Ready? The envelope please….The researchers found that when the photo of the overweight person accompanied the meal, participants perceived those meals to be less healthy than the same meal presented with a photo of a thin blogger. Wait, there’s more. In a second experiment, the researchers also included calorie and fat content information next to the image of the food and above the thumbnail of the blogger, but they still found that people are still strongly influenced by the body weight of the recommender. The Chronicle reports that the researchers even went so far as to vary the fat and calorie content, so that some subjects saw a healthy nutritional label and others saw a label with approximately double the calorie content and triple the fat. They found that this increase in fat and calories influenced impressions of the meals’ healthfulness to a similar extent as the heavy vs. thin blogger, all else being equal.