Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Public Health Nutrition

Volume

27

Issue

1

PubMed ID

39310984

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

School

School of Medical and Health Sciences

RAS ID

75955

Funders

2022 The Kids Research Institute Australia Research Focus Area Collaboration Award

Comments

Munro, E., Wells, G., Paciente, R., Wickens, N., Ta, D., Mandzufas, J., ... & Woolard, A. (2024). Diet culture on TikTok: a descriptive content analysis. Public Health Nutrition, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980024001381

Abstract

Objective: To investigate how dieting is portrayed on TikTok and the potential implications for public health considering the effect of diet culture on eating disorders amongst young people. Design: A cross-sectional descriptive content analysis of 250 videos from the five most popular diet-related hashtags. A codebook was developed to analyse the content of the videos and collect the engagement for each video (likes, comments and shares). Setting: TikTok website. Participants: There were no participants in this study. Results: More than half of the videos portrayed 'body checking', a potentially harmful practice for body image. Of the videos that represented body image, almost half represented body image negatively. However, most videos promoted the idea of 'healthy eating', and only 6·4 % displayed disordered eating behaviours. Over half of the videos provided dietary advice, and of those videos, most content creators claimed to be experts (64 %). Claiming expertise was not significantly associated with engagement; however, the use of humour was significantly associated with engagement. Additionally, males were more likely than females to disclose their goals of the diet. Conclusions: Overall, it appears that TikTok is commonly used to share nutrition tips and personal experiences around dieting and eating in general, often employing humour as an effective technique. The popularity of the platform and rapid dissemination of information would be a useful tool for health professionals, especially those working with eating disorders, to utilise.

DOI

10.1017/S1368980024001381

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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