While posting your weight loss journey or sharing your weekly grocery shopping with friends and followers on TikTok and other social media It may seem harmless, videos and hashtags like #WhatIEatInADay can actually help promote unhealthy eating behaviors in young adults, a new to study published in PLOS One found.
Researchers at the University of Vermont analyzed 1,000 TikTok videos with the most popular hashtags related to body image and diet using search terms such as food, nutrition, weight, and body image.
The study included 10 hashtags with at least a billion views or more. On the list were #WhatIEatInADay and #WeightLoss, which had 3.2 billion views and nearly 10 billion views, respectively. at the beginning of the study.
Less than 3% of the nutrition-related TikTok videos analyzed by the study researchers included weight. While the vast majority of the content was normative about weight, which identifies weight as the main determinant of health.
Narrowly 44% of shared videos included weight loss content; 20.4% portrayed someone’s weight transformation.
Many of the videos also assigned good or bad labels to foods that can “lead to the development of eating disorders such as orthorexia nervosa, an eating disorder defined as an obsession with eating ‘correctly’ and a fixation on the role of food in our lives.” physical health, the study says.
Young adults may be at higher risk
The harmful implications of weight loss content could hit the app’s young and vulnerable demographic head-on.
A third of TikTok users in the US were 14 years old or younger in 2020according to the study authors.
The most concerning finding of the study is the number of young women who engaged with the weight loss content.
More than 60% of the videos were created by people featuring women, and more than half were made by teen or college users.
The researchers found that “young women who create and engage with weight- or food-related content on TikTok are at risk of internalized body image and disordered eating behaviors from other aspects of their lives.”
The study also found that most weight loss nutrition advice was provided by non-experts.
“These types of videos are likely to spread and promote harmful dietary interventions to a vulnerable audience that may not have strong media literacy skills,” the researchers wrote in the article.
Only 1.4% of videos offering nutrition advice were made by registered dietitians.
And TikTok’s “For You” feature continually populates videos with related content that users often engage with.
This means that “if someone is constantly engaging with diet, weight loss, or food content, those videos will continue to appear unless the user actively selects a window labeled ‘not interested,'” the study says.
In 2020, TikTok started implementing policies that censor eating disorder content — an approach Instagram also took when prohibited ads for weight loss.
But the study authors believe that with the high volume of videos promoting diet culture on the app, professionals may need to step in.
They encourage health experts to take into account the type of content that young people interact with and find ways to counteract it to prevent harmful eating behaviors.
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