Instagramming your food may not do much for the people you’re eating with, especially if they feel compelled to sit there, politely waiting as their meals get cold, while you set up the perfect beauty shot, tinker with your filters, settle on the right hashtag and post a photo for the masses to admire. But stopping to snap a photo of your food may be helping you in ways you hadn’t even considered -- ways that go way beyond impressing everyone following your feed.

Pausing momentarily to produce an image of your perfectly plated pasta, gorgeously cheesy pizza, towering burger or decadently delicious-looking doughnuts, rather than diving right in, helps you savor “indulgent” foods, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing.

“In effect,” the researchers determined, photographing your food before you eat it “increases attitudes and taste evaluations of the experience when consumption actually takes place.”

In other words, snapping a photo of your food and sharing it on social media can actually make it taste better.

Take that, everyone who has ever griped about you doing it!

Photo courtesy of iStock

Amy Reiter is a writer and editor based in New York. A regular contributor to The Los Angeles Times, she has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Glamour, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast and Wine Spectator, among others, as well as for Salon, where she was a longtime editor and senior writer. In addition to contributing to Healthy Eats, she blogs for Food Network’s FN Dish.