While posting your weight loss journey on TikTok and other social media or sharing your weekly grocery shopping with your friends and followers It may seem harmless, but videos and hashtags like #WhatIEatInADay can actually encourage harmful eating behaviors in young adults, new research published in PLOS One reveals. became.
Researchers at the University of Vermont used search terms like food, nutrition, weight, and body image to analyze 1,000 TikTok videos under the most popular hashtags related to body image and diet. did.
The study included 10 hashtags with at least 1 billion views or more.The list included #WhatIEatInADay and #WeightLoss, with nearly 3.2 billion and 10 billion views respectively At the beginning of the study.
Fewer than 3% of the nutrition-related TikTok videos analyzed by the study’s researchers contained weight. Although the bulk of the content was weight standards that identified weight as a primary determinant of health.
Almost 44% of the videos shared contained weight loss content. 20.4% described someone’s weight change.
Many of the videos also label foods as good or bad, “which can lead to the development of eating disorders such as neurogenic orthorexia,” the study says.
Young adults may be most at risk
The detrimental effects of weight loss content can fall squarely on the app’s young and vulnerable demographic.
A third of TikTok users in the US were under the age of 14 in 2020, according to the study’s authors.
Of greatest concern in this study is the number of young women who interacted with weight loss content.
Over 60% of the videos were created by female presenters, and over half were created by users who were teens or in college.
Researchers found that “young women who create and engage in weight- and food-related content on TikTok are at risk of internalizing body image and disrupting eating behaviors from other aspects of their lives.” .
The study also found that most nutritional advice for weight loss is provided by non-professionals.
“This type of video is likely to spread to vulnerable audiences with low media literacy skills and facilitate harmful diet interventions,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Only 1.4% of videos offering nutritional advice were created by registered dietitians.
In addition, TikTok’s “For You” feature continually adds relevant content that users often interact with in their videos.
This means that “if someone is consistently engaged in dieting, weight loss, or food content, those videos will continue to appear unless the user actively selects a window labeled ‘not interested'”. means that it will be done,” said the study.
In 2020, TikTok began implementing policies to censor eating disorder content. This is the approach Instagram also took when it banned weight loss ads.
However, the authors of the study believe that due to the large amount of videos promoting diet culture on the app, experts may need to intervene.
They encourage health professionals to keep in mind the types of content young people are consuming and come up with countermeasures to prevent unhealthy eating habits.
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