But other research has shown that when it comes to appetite, food porn may be a substitute for food itself. One 2011 study found that looking at pictures of food may turn people off from the real thing—but only if the food in the image has a similar flavor to whatever real item is about to be consumed. When volunteers viewed photos of salty snacks and then ate salted peanuts, they tended to enjoy the nuts less than people who had viewed photos of desserts.

And in 2013 study in mice published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, when researchers flooded the reward centers of the rodents’ brains with insulin, a hormone that triggers feelings of fullness, the mice lost interest in returning to places where they had previously been given food—suggesting, the authors said, that the brain’s reward centers may not respond as much to “food cues”—a feeding area for mice, a photo for humans—when the brain knows that the stomach is full.