How many times have you heard “Plant proteins aren’t complete!” “Fruit is just sugar; it raises insulin!” “It’s got more than four ingredients, so avoid it!”?
Everyday, we’re bombarded with confusing and conflicting information from social media influencers, demanding that we follow their advice. Spend a few minutes scrolling through social media and your feed will show multiple fitness influencers blurting “facts” about some food or another.
Does this matter? Food habits have, after all, always been influenced by others. For centuries, social norms have underpinned how we eat for centuries. And outsourcing dietary advice is nothing new: magazines, newspapers, books and TV have been pushing fad diets for decades. Indeed, many influencers do promote healthy food choices and delicious-looking recipes. What, then, is the problem?
Why Nutrition Misinformation Is a Problem
Research has shown that influencers lead to “greater purchase intentions” due to participants identifying with, relating to and trusting them [1]. In a 2022 study, one in five adults admitted to regularly following influencers for their food choices [2].
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of the sway that influencers have over foods comes from a 2019 randomised controlled study in which children were split into three groups: one group was shown an influencer with unhealthy snacks, another was shown an influencer with healthy foods and the last group was shown an influencer with no food products. Children in the group that saw the influencer with unhealthy foods consumed 32 percent more calories from unhealthy snacks and 26 percent more total calories than the kids in the group who viewed the vlogger with non-food products [3].
Scientists warn that, anthropologically speaking, digital media and food endorsements are a very recent development in human history and our brains have yet to catch up [4]. Powerful visuals of delicious food have an outsized impact on our imagination: our brains have evolved to identify resources in an environment that’s both scarce and potentially dangerous. These adaptations give a lot of room to content creators to capture our attention with potentially harmful consequences.
One 2019 UK-based study found that social media influencers with cult-like followings gave incorrect health advice 90 percent of the time [5]. A 2024 study examined nutrition-related content on influential Australian accounts and found that nearly half the posts contained inaccuracies but that those by nutritionists and dietitians were of higher quality [6]. It also found that better engagement was associated with worse quality: it’s much easier to make catchy videos that go viral when you don’t get bogged down with all the hard work required to properly cross-check your content!
The influencer market benefits from a vast and potentially dangerous impact on people’s food choices, and marketing agencies offer a glimpse into their reach. One consultancy’s website proudly boasts that “compared to the average food or beverage brand ... influencers harness 5 times better results” [7].
The more likes or comments a post generates, the greater the return on investment, with some companies making as much as $6.50 for every dollar they invest in influencer campaigns [8]. With social media an integral part of our daily lives, it’s too late to reverse this trend, and given the overwhelming number of influencers posting their lives online, a mass extinction of performing pseudo-sages is unlikely. What’s more, as AI technologies become ever more sophisticated, it’s entirely possible that in the not-so-distant future, apps like TikTok will be serving a diet of clips purposefully made by AI that is acutely in tune with a user’s viewing behaviour.
Anti-Science and Fear-mongering
With so much conflicting information, it can be hard to extract the useful from the trash. There have been snake-oil salesmen, of course, since humans have been trading with each other. But in a world with social media at its core, the bulk of health and fitness influencers push fake information to suit their own agendas. Naturally, one of the main motivators is financial gain: they produce clickbait content to attract potential customers into purchasing their goods or services. Yet online incentives needn’t be solely monetary: popularity, gaining followers and ideologies are equally persuasive motivators. Many influencers display a narcissistic disregard for what’s true, and a Messiah complex driven by gaining admiration.
Naturally, when untrained individuals cite research, they are liable to interpret the findings incorrectly. But of greater concern is when a study’s findings are deliberately misrepresented in order to push a particular message. Of course, you don’t need to be an academic to learn the necessary skills to be able to interpret a scientific paper, but a worryingly large number of influencers lack the competency to accurately communicate research findings. Content makers, with hundreds of thousands of followers, disingenuously drive their unqualified claims for their own dogmatic motivations.
This misinformation ranges from echoing something they’ve heard from another pseudo “expert” to outright lies and deliberate deception. It’s quite possible that, in some cases, influencers come with good intentions and genuinely believe their ideas will benefit their followers. However, lacking substantiation, any assertion is likely ideological. For some, their very identity is attached to their nutrition beliefs. A nutrition message that lacks the required level of rigour behind it could be hazardous to people’s health.
How, then, if these pseudo-profits are doling out misinformation, do they manage to amass large followings? They do so by endowing a sense of control. By preaching easy-to-understand sound bites, their followers feel they have more control in this otherwise scary, complex world. By claiming that if you heed their advice, they will heal you, their disciples have the saviour they desire. This black-and-white communication style makes them extremely compelling and goes some way to explain their huge fan base. Their audience wants to be pandered to in such a way that they don’t care that what they’re being told is truth tracking. Nor does the audience even care if the truth is tracked.
The blame shouldn’t lie solely with the influencers: the platforms should be taking much of the responsibility. After all, algorithms favour posts that have a greater number of likes, comments and shares, and shorter videos get better engagement because viewers are more likely to watch them to the end, further favouring the algorithm. It’s been shown that lies and misinformation spread both faster and farther than factual information [9], and that negative posts spread more rapidly than positive ones [10]. Humans, it seems, are wired to chase news that’s more novel and attention-grabbing than news that’s positive or true.
To take advantage of this glitch in the human psyche, one tactic is to demonise particular foods, and not just processed foods or branded products, but fruit, cereals, milk and other items that have been providing humans with precious sustenance for many thousands of years. By vilifying foods that aren’t in line with their narrative, they seek to scare people into shunning foods that, they assert, “aren’t meant for the human body”. By using phrases like “spikes blood sugar”, “increases insulin”, “causes inflammation” and other medical-sounding terms, they fear-monger their audience, yet they provide no explanation of the mechanisms behind their claims nor the health consequences.
Disease Shaming Is Becoming Worse
While none of this sounds great, you might be thinking, “So what?” After all, despite villainising some items, a lot of the content of quack influencers does include healthy, nutrient-rich foods: I’ve seen many images of delicious-looking recipes amid otherwise questionable content. Moreover, their content is plastered with testimonials from fans claiming that they feel fantastic after following the advice of their favourite guru. So, if people are appreciating the advice, what is it that’s so worrying about the information these demigods preach?
To start with, rejecting foods like fruit, veg, cereals and even some processed foods could result in people missing out on valuable nutrients like fibre, essential fats and key micronutrients. Yet, the repercussions of dangerous nutrition content aren’t limited to the physiological: there are equally concerning environmental and psycho-social impacts, too. As well as endowing humanity with improved access to sustenance and a wider range of foods, globalisation has led to an increased number of people with a poor relationship with food. Eating disorders are among the deadliest mental illnesses and cases are continuing to rise. According to a systematic review, the global prevalence of eating disorders more than doubled from 3.5 percent for the period between 2000 and 2006 to 7.8 percent between 2013 and 2018 [11].
On top of that, the age of onset of eating disorders is getting younger: the typical age used to be between 15 and 19 years old, but over the last 20 years, a greater number of kids under 14 have been experiencing disordered eating [12]. The reasons for this are complex, but platforms like Instagram and TikTok are partly to blame. Not only do they encourage fitness influencers to post selfies, compelling people to aspire to unrealistic goals, but they also permit pseudo-gurus to dictate what their audiences should and shouldn’t be eating.
We are living in a time of climate change, ecological destruction and demographic growth, and many families continually endure day-to-day financial pressures and other stresses of modern life. If the majority of people were to adopt the advice doled out by some influencers – such as by those who advocate meat-heavy diets – the food system, in its current guise, simply wouldn’t cope. As well as this, there are foods shunned by influencers that are linked to particular cultures; villainising them risks alienating people based on their cultural preferences. Much of the advice from unqualified influencers is, frankly, unrealistic.
What’s preached is a one-size-fits-all when, in reality, it’s a one-size-fits-none approach. For many online charlatans, preaching their ideology is more important to them than actually caring about the wellbeing of their audience. What are the benefits of trying to make people feel like they must buy a particular food or behave in a certain way when they’re already experiencing multiple burdens in their daily lives? With many people impacted by socio-economic strife and financial tensions, influencers who fear monger affordable foods while promoting expensive alternatives reek of unrealised privilege.
However, the main issue with fear-mongering foods is more fundamental: it’s pointless. Let’s say you have a really terrible diet and you eat one nutrient-packed bean salad. Guess what happens to your health? Absolutely nothing!
But for some reason, the fear mongers act like eating just one delicious, high-sugar food is going to ruin your health. By the same logic: if you have a super-nutritious diet and you eat one large chocolate bar, what will happen to your health? You guessed it: literally nothing! What matters for your health is not individual foods but overall dietary patterns and lifestyle.
Call to Action
What to eat is a contentious issue because, well, eating is something we all do. So, from this perspective, it’s understandable that everyone has an opinion when it comes to food. But this lack of accountability across the board means we’ve created the ideal environment for charlatans, grifters and zealots. In a world overflowing with nutrition information, approach dietary advice with caution.
References:
1. (a) Schouten, A. P. et al. (2020) ‘Celebrity vs. Influencer Endorsements in Advertising: The Role of Identification, Credibility, and Product-Endorser Fit’, International Journal of Advertising, 39(2), 258-81; (b) Chung, A. et al. (2021) ‘Adolescent Peer Influence on Eating Behaviors via Social Media: Scoping Review’, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(6), e19697.
2. Alwafi, H. et al. (2022) ‘The Impact of Social Media Influencers on Food Consumption in Saudi Arabia, a Cross-Sectional Web-Based Survey’, Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare, 15, 2129-39.
3. Coates, A. E. et al. (2019) ‘Social Media Influencer Marketing and Children’s Food Intake: A Randomized Trial’, Pediatrics, 143(4), e20182554.
4. Spence, C. et al. (2016) ‘Eating with Our Eyes: From Visual Hunger to Digital Satiation’, Brain and Cognition, 110, 53-63.
5. Forrest, A. (2019) ‘Social Media Influencers Give Bad Diet and Fitness Advice Eight Times Out of Nine, Research Reveals’, Independent, 30 April. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/social-media-weight-loss-diet-twitter-influencers-bloggers-glasgow-university-a8891971.html (Accessed: 16 September 2024).
6. Denniss, E. et al. (2024) ‘#Fail: The Quality and Accuracy of Nutrition-Related Information by Influential Australian Instagram Accounts’, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 21(1), 16.
7. Turel, O. et al. (2014) ‘Examination of Neural Systems Sub-Serving Facebook “Addiction”’, Psychological Reports, 115(3), 675-95.
8. Taylor, C. (2023) ‘Got to Have It: The Dangers of Social Media Impulse Buying’, Reuters, 28 September. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/technology/got-have-it-dangers-social-media-impulse-buying-2023-09-28/
9. Vosoughi, S. et al. (2018) ‘The Spread of True and False News Online’, Science, 359, 1146-51.
10. (a) Senz, K. (2021) ‘Outrage Spreads Faster on Twitter: Evidence from 44 News Outlets’, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 13 July. Available at: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/hate-spreads-faster-on-twitter-evidence-from-44-news-outlets (Accessed: 16 September 2024);
(b) Robertson, C. E. et al. (2023) ‘Negativity Drives Online News Consumption’, Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 812-22.
11. Galmiche, M. et al. (2019) ‘Prevalence of Eating Disorders over the 2000–2018 Period: A Systematic Literature Review’, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 109(5), 1402-13.
12. Jenkins, Z. M. et al. (2020) ‘A Comparison of Eating Disorder Symptomatology, Psychological Distress and Psychosocial Function Between Early, Typical and Later Onset Anorexia Nervosa’, Journal of Eating Disorders, 8, 56
