TikTok clips on the topics of nutrition and weight loss are enticing more and more adolescents to go on unnecessary starvation diets. The Pew Research Center examined 1,000 videos on the platform for the ten most popular diet, food and weight-related hashtags. Each video had at least a billion views. Key themes of the posts were the glorification of weight loss and the positioning of foods that claim to make you slim.
Disordered eating behavior as a result
According to the authors, much of this content leads to “disordered eating and body dissatisfaction” in young people. In the survey, 67 percent of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 said they use TikTok, with 16 percent doing it “almost constantly.” Most of the videos analyzed (64.6 percent) were produced by women. High school and college-aged YouTubers made up 11.1 and 42.4 percent of posts, respectively, while Millennials (30- to 40-year-olds) created nearly a third (28.2 percent) of videos. Result: 44 percent of all of these videos deal with the topic of weight loss and 20.4 percent show how people become slimmer through diets.
Researchers say many videos convey the message that "a person's weight is indicative of their health and moral status." In a fifth (21 percent) of the videos analyzed, TikTok content creators showed a positive body image, but mostly after losing weight on a diet. Almost half of the videos (47 percent) that use the “nutrition” hashtag provide nutritional information – for example, advice on which foods to eat to lose weight. In many of these videos, the creators demonstrate their weight loss and share how they achieved it. Only 1.4 percent of these recommendations come from registered dietitians.
Too many false role models
Eight out of 10 U.S. girls ages 10 have dieted Common Sense Media Media may create unrealistic expectations in this context, as most (87 percent) female characters aged 10 to 17 in the most popular children's television shows are slimmer than average. University of Queensland had previously pointed out the dangerous effects of social media. Their investigation was about drug consumption (press release reported: http://pte.com/news/20220915002 ).
Source:
Press release
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