Is there coal tar in your mac & cheese? Arsenic in your breakfast juice? Beaver urine in your raspberry ice cream? There have been stories on the Internet supporting all of the above suggested yuckies and a whole lot more. Does that make you anxious about your food? It does a lot of people.
That’s not a problem I struggle with, as I open up my McDonalds bag and gobble. (Of course, the beltline on my jeans probably wishes I’d wake up with a few night terrors about a Big Mac.) But there are quite a few people who have a hard time with their chow. And a new study suggests that it’s folks also tethered to social media who end up being the most fearful.
OK, I’m sure you’re rolling your eyes right now and groaning, “C’mon, not another Facebook horror story.” But, hey, I’m just reporting ’em as I see ’em. So grab some sour cream and rodent hair chips and follow along.
According to the study, there are gazillions of worries that people circulate about our foodstuffs. And it turns out a lot of them aren’t as based on fact as we might think. “We’ve been looking at a lot of these food misconceptions,” said food psychologist Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing at Cornell University, in a today.com article. “It’s kind of crazy. How do these things get started and get traction without really any evidence at all?”
So Wansink and his fellows started surveying more than a thousand moms with at least two kids. And they discovered that the majority of the people who had multiple food fears were also people who sought out most of their “food facts” from Facebook, blogs and other social media sources.
“They tend to be the people who get the most information from ‘like me’ sources,” Wansink reported. “When you start to do searches on the Internet you can always find … support.”
On top of that, food worriers are also the sorts who will get so fired up about their findings—even if it is a stretch of the truth—that they’ll jump right back on their own Facebook page or blog and keep echoing the misconception.
“Compared to the general population, they have a higher need to tell other people about their opinion,” Wansink added. “It ends up unnecessarily causing fear or causes some sort of nervousness.”
So the moral of the story is: Be wise. Do your research and take your Facebook consumption with a, uh, grain of salt. ‘Cause it’s probably as full of useless fat as the processed chow that you’re giving the evil-eye.
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