While posting your weight loss journey on TikTok and other social media or sharing your weekly grocery shopping with your friends and followers While they may seem harmless, videos and hashtags like #WhatIEatInADay can actually help promote harmful eating behaviors in young adults. study Posted in PLOS.
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 researchers in this study included 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.
In 2020, a third of US TikTok users were under the age of 14according to the study 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 started implementing Policy to Censor Eating Disorder Content — The approach taken by Instagram at the time Ban 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 consume and come up with ways to counteract and prevent unhealthy eating habits.
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