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Wagamaga OP t1_iunu9u2 wrote

New research from the University of Vermont finds the most viewed content on TikTok relating to food, nutrition and weight perpetuates a toxic diet culture among teens and young adults and that expert voices are largely missing from the conversation.

Published today in PLOS One, the study found weight-normative messaging, the idea that weight is the most important measure of a person’s health, largely predominates on TikTok with the most popular videos glorifying weight loss and positioning food as a means to achieve health and thinness. The findings are particularly concerning given existing research indicating social media usage in adolescents and young adults is associated with disordered eating and negative body image.

“Each day, millions of teens and young adults are being fed content on TikTok that paints a very unrealistic and inaccurate picture of food, nutrition and health,” said senior researcher Lizzy Pope, associate professor and director of the Didactic Program in Dietetics at UVM. “Getting stuck in weight loss TikTok can be a really tough environment, especially for the main users of the platform, which are young people."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0267997

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kittenTakeover t1_iunycsl wrote

>Published today in PLOS One, the study found weight-normative messaging, the idea that weight is the most important measure of a person’s health

I guess it really depends what you mean by "most important", but I think an argument could definitely be made that weight is the most important health measure. Compared to the difficulty of taking the measurement, weight has a high level of predictive value on most measures of health. Can you get a better picture with more effort? Sure. Is there a more predictive measure that can be generally applied for the average person? I'm not sure. Also note that saying weight is predictive of health is not the same as saying minimizing weight is predictive of health.

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