On many social media sites, messaging about food and diet is everywhere. Watch the “for you” feed on TikTok for more than a few minutes – the recommended content for a given user of the app – and you are almost guaranteed to see a video in which someone shows you #whatieatinaday (#wieiad for short), or explains how their diet has transformed their body.
There is growing evidence that this can impact people’s body image, especially among teenage girls, which could lead to conditions like anorexia or bulimia.
Recent years have seen fears growing about the impacts of social media on mental health, especially for children and adolescents. Studies suggest these concerns are largely overblown, but some people may be at risk from certain types of content, namely food or diet-related subject matter.
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Sites like Instagram and TikTok are primarily visual, often showing faces and bodies. This has important implications for altering our body image, says at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “The ability to visually curate and change one’s photos and videos is extremely important,” she says.
Much of this material is aimed at young people, many of whom already have body image concerns. In a study published in June, at the University of Waterloo in Canada and his colleagues surveyed more than 21,000 people aged 10 to 17 in six countries. Only 45 per cent said their body size , and those who spent more time on social media tended to report greater dissatisfaction.
“When kids go through puberty, their bodies change in ways that, especially for cisgender girls, bring them further from beauty ideals,” says Choukas-Bradley. “They also become extremely self-conscious and really interested in peer relationships, popularity, social status and getting approval from peers.”
Choukas-Bradley has coined the term “” to describe people imagining how others on social media will , and carefully choosing a selfie to present themselves in the best light.
The risk may be highest among girls and women, who are thought to be disproportionately affected by and . In August, and , both at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia, found that women aged 18 to 28 who watched a brief pro-anorexia video on TikTok reported a bigger than those who watched a neutral video.
But two months later, Choukas-Bradley and her colleagues found that among both girls and boys aged 11 to 15, there was a between appearance-related social media consciousness and lower appearance esteem, with each driving the other.
“There’s a lot of content that is dressed up as wellness culture,” says Hogg, which she calls “disordered eating by another name”. Often, food videos are presented as holistic and healthy, but show a calorie-deficient diet that would lead to rapid weight loss.
Globally, rates of eating disorders from 3.5 to 7.8 per cent between 2000 and 2018, and following the arrival of covid-19.
The deluge of food and body-related content on social media may be partly behind this. A pre-print paper released in October found that TikTok use is associated with increased , like skipping meals, among 18 to 25-year-olds.
“Kids that already have a susceptibility to disordered eating, or to low self-esteem or body image, are going to seek out the types of influencers and the types of social media content related to that,” says Hammond.
Whether social media is directly responsible is hard to pin down, but, for some, the research is compelling. “I believe the evidence is clear that, when it comes to body image concerns and disordered eating, social media has played an important causal role,” says Choukas-Bradley.
“Social media did not invent the idea of an idealised body shape and size,” says Hammond. However, the volume of content – especially on TikTok, where short videos come thick and fast – is relatively new, he says.
So, how do we tackle this? The most dramatic solution has been enacted by Australia: a ban on social media for under-16s, which researchers say is unworkable.
“I suspect that a greater level of regulation will be an important part of this,” says Hammond. This could include regulating influencers who promote products, including food, as we do with advertising for other things, such as tobacco.
“I think the most basic, wide-scale change that would make the biggest difference is for social media companies to be required to allow users to have more control over their user experience,” says Choukas-Bradley, who also wants more access to the vast troves of data held by social media companies. By analysing it, researchers “could really learn a lot about the specific types of content that promote harm and how to mitigate that”, she says.
A spokesperson for Instagram says it has never allowed content that promotes, encourages or glorifies eating disorders, and points to the recent launch of Teen Accounts, where “teens will be placed into the strictest setting of our sensitive content control, so they’re even less likely to be recommended sensitive content, and in many cases we hide this content altogether”.
A TikTok spokesperson says it doesn’t allow content showing or promoting disordered eating or any dangerous weight loss behaviour, and that systems are in place to prevent such videos being viewed.
