It used to be that if you were flipping through cable channels, the thought of eating didn’t even cross your mind until you landed on the Food Network. Times change, yet some things stay the same: a new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that today’s teenagers say TikTok, with its bevy of food content, makes them hungry.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota conducted focus groups with 25 teenagers, mostly 15- and 16-year-olds, about what they encounter while scrolling. The answer was essentially food, food, food. Recipe videos that move so fast there’s no way they’re actually useful. Restaurant reviews for places they’ll never go. Viral challenges that reach the perfect balance of stupid and wasteful to be entertaining. “What I eat in a day”-style videos that push the envelope of what is considered interesting.
There’s a ton of food content out there, and like one too many videos, watch one too many of them, and they all start magnetizing themselves straight to your For You page, sometimes filling the viewer with the immediate desire to consume.
The teens reportedly described seeing food from another city or country and wishing, hoping, that they could have it right now, if only that specific dish wasn’t half a world away.
TikTok Influences Gen Z Diets, But It’s Not the Only Thing
Pair up all that food content with influencers, and the effect strengthens. A creator with a huge following seems to lend legitimacy to the rapidly cut-together series of food images. That said, teens involved in the focus group can spot a sponsored post when they see one.
When it comes to food, parents didn’t have as much influence as the algorithm, which is probably a good summation of the modern age as a whole. But they weren’t entirely irrelevant. The teens said that family meals and other face-to-face activities that did a decent enough job of pulling them away from TikTok and genuine conversations about dieting and body image helped them make sense of the barrage of content they were seeing and gave them the tools necessary to question it.
Obviously, it was a small exploratory study based on a small group of teenagers and their perceptions. There were no real scientific measurements of what they actually eat nor did the researchers try to form a direct link between viewing habits and eating habits, but it’s not much of a stretch to assume that if you’re watching footage of food, you’re probably going to want it in your mouth in due time.
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