Nutrition Misinformation and Social Media

Why We Should Be Cautious of Food Influencers

“Avoid oats; they cause inflammation!” “Fruit is just sugar; it raises insulin!” “Avoid fish or you’ll poison your body with mercury!” “Cruciferous veg lowers your testosterone!” “It’s got more than four ingredients, so it’s ultra-processed!” Day after day, we’re bombarded with confusing and conflicting information from social media influencers, demanding that we follow their nutrition advice. Spend a few minutes scrolling through social media and your feed will show multiple fitness influencers blurting “facts” about some food or another.

Social media has become an irrefutable fact of the 21st century. In 2022, more than 4.59 billion people worldwide were using social media, a figure almost double that of 2017 [1]. What’s more, users are spending more and more time on their favourite channels. As figures from 2022 reveal, the average internet user spends 151 minutes on social media per day, up from 147 minutes in the previous year [2]. With more and more people online, social media networks have emerged as robust content marketing and branding tools, paving the way for hordes of increasingly influential “digital creators”. 

With stats abound on daily social media consumption, the impact that influencers have on our behaviour remains somewhat less clear. From which books you read to dating habits, online gurus have rapidly slipped into deeply intimate and personal aspects of our lives. Take book buyers, for example: last year, 1 in 4 book buyers in Britain used TikTok to find their literary past-time [3]. A separate study from the US showed that more than 1 in 3 adults routinely relies on social media influencers to buy their products [4]. Although some books may turn out not to be the life-changing, stomach-jolting thrillers advertised on the app, filling up your book-shelf can hardly be seen as catastrophic. Yet, as previously discussed in my article Messiah Syndrome In Nutrition, food influencers pose a somewhat different threat.

Personal endorsements used to be about harnessing someone’s celebrity status. Until a few years ago, Gordon Ramsay was one of the most popular food influencers in the UK on Instagram, and he now has 17 million followers, with Jamie Oliver’s 10 million coming in second. Both long-standing professional chefs with years of experience, generating well-balanced, educational food content. The recent proliferation of food influencers who have mistaken posting videos with having a career in the food industry suggests that the educational food environment has morphed into something completely new. Open up your TikTok or Instagram feed and you will likely stumble upon swarms of influencers showcasing their latest #WhatIEatInADay video.

Why This Is a Problem

To those outside of the nutrition and dietetic circle, the scale of the phenomenon might not seem immediately obvious. However, a quick glance at studies on the impact of influencers on dietary choices reveals that the academic literature is alarmingly scant on this. Most studies published to date show that influencers lead to “greater purchase intentions” due to participants identifying, relating to and trusting influencers – oddly, in some cases more than actual celebrities [5]. In a 2022 study, one in five adults admitted to regularly following food influencers to identify their munchy of choice [6]. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of the sway that influencers have over people’s food choices comes from a randomised controlled study published in 2019, in which 176 children were split into three groups: one group of kids was shown an influencer with unhealthy snacks, another group 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% more calories from unhealthy snacks and 26% more total calories than the kids in the group who viewed the vlogger with non-food products [7]. 

Why does it matter? Food habits have, after all, always been influenced by others. Social norms have underpinned the practice of eating for millennia. And outsourcing dietary advice is nothing new: magazines, newspapers, books and TV have been pushing fad diets for decades. In addition, food influencers might save customers time and perhaps even money as they buy stuff they actually like. Or do they? 

Starting with social norms, the recent proliferation of all-knowing food prophets dishing out improbable hashtags suggests that today’s content could hardly be compared to yesterday’s word-of-mouth recommendations. Neuroscientists warn that, anthropologically speaking, digital media and food endorsements are a very recent development in human history and our brain hasn’t quite caught up with this [8]. Powerful visuals of palatable food have an outsized impact on our imagination because our brains are engineered 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. A UK-based study found that social media influencers with cult-like followings gave incorrect health advice 90% of the time [9]. Kids are particularly exposed, with available estimates suggesting that, on average, they are subjected to food marketing content between 30 and 189 times a week [10]. Sadly, the majority of food content presented to children fails to meet WHO advertising standards [11].

What this means is that in a hyper-connected world, food information is being chewed and digested more quickly than ever. Perhaps too quickly. Although the link with social media might not seem immediately obvious, as early as 2014, neuroscientists concluded that Facebook triggers the same impulsive part of the brain as gambling and substance abuse [12]. This brings us to our second point: money. According to Reuters, between September 2022 and September 2023, Americans spent $71 billion on online “impulse” purchases [13]. 

Call to Action

When it comes to food shopping specifically, data is patchy, but marketing agencies offer a glimpse into the influencers’ reach. On its website, Flaminjoy proudly boasts that “compared to the average food or beverage brand ..., influencers harness 5 times better results” [14]. As the agency points out, the recipe is simple: the more likes or comments a post generates, the greater the return on investment for the brand, with some companies making as much as $6.50 for every dollar they invest in influencer campaigns [15].

The influencer market has a dirty secret: it benefits from a vast, and potentially dangerous, impact on people’s food choices. This leaves us with two thoughts. The first is that it is too late to reverse this trend: social media is an integral part of our daily life and, given the overwhelming number of influencers snapping and filming their lifestyle online, a mass extinction of camera-holding, frantically gesticulating 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 Facebook will serve a diet of clips purposefully made by AI that is acutely in tune with a user’s viewing behaviour.

The second thought is that the collective wisdom of these walking adverts hardly benefits users. As screen time gobbles up an increasing proportion of people’s waking time, the impact of engagement-maximising videos on individual food choices should be studied and perhaps even moderated to reduce the incentive to sensationalise. But this is unlikely to happen. Social media has always been opaque, since every feed is different. TikTok, for instance, attracts roughly one billion users worldwide, but it is a black box to researchers [16]. Other platforms, such as Facebook, have only just started to allow researchers to access data about pages, posts and groups. However, not every country is included in the database, and only researchers at qualifying academic or non-profit research institutions are granted access, which limits the scale of academic research [17].

With so much conflicting information leaching into our brains, it’s hard to extract the useful from the crap. There have been snake-oil salesmen, of course, since humans have been trading with each other. But we find ourselves in a world with social media at its core, with the bulk of health and fitness influencers pushing fake information to suit their own agendas. Online incentives needn’t be solely financial, incidentally: popularity, gaining followers and diet ideologies are equally persuasive motivators. Worse still, I can’t help but feel that it’s become cool in certain camps to disagree with any mainstream view. There seems to be an anti-conventional-science rhetoric floating around, which is especially rife when it comes to health information and has worsened since the pandemic. Here’s a thought: could it be that nutrition science is merely another victim of anti-establishment conspiratorial ideologies?

What to eat is a contentious issue because, well, eating is something we all do, so it’s understandable that everyone has an opinion when it comes to food. But this lack of accountability across the board means we have created the ideal environment for charlatans. In a world overflowing with nutrition information, it’s crucial to approach dietary advice with caution. With influencers continuing to dish out questionable advice, will you know when not to bite?

Postscript

This article was co-written by Marco Travaglio. Marco holds a PhD in Neuroscience and is passionate about health and nutrition. It was he who collated the research. I am truly grateful.

References:
1. Statista (2024b) Number of Social Media Users Worldwide from 2017 to 2027 (in Billions). Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/ (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
2. Statista (2024a) Daily Time Spent on Social Networking by Internet Users Worldwide from 2012 to 2023 (in Minutes). Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/ (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
3. Kemp-Habib, A. (2023) ‘TikTok’s Influence on Direct Book Sales “Relatively Small” but Growing Rapidly, Says Nielsen’, The Bookseller, 22 March. Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/tiktoks-influence-on-direct-book-sales-relatively-small-but-growing-rapidly-says-nielsen (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
4. Oracle (2022) ‘37% of Consumers Trust Social Media Influencers Over Brands’, PR Newswire, 3 May. Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/37-of-consumers-trust-social-media-influencers-over-brands-301538111.html (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
5. (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.
6. 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.
7. Coates, A. E. et al. (2019) ‘Social Media Influencer Marketing and Children’s Food Intake: A Randomized Trial’, Pediatrics, 143(4), e20182554.
8. Spence, C. et al. (2016) ‘Eating with Our Eyes: From Visual Hunger to Digital Satiation’, Brain and Cognition, 110, 53-63.
9. 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: 17 March 2024).
10. Potvin Kent, M., et al. (2019) ‘Children and Adolescents’ Exposure to Food and Beverage Marketing in Social Media Apps’, Pediatric Obesity, 14(6), e12508.
11. Winzer, E. et al. (2022) ‘Promotion of Food and Beverages by German-Speaking Influencers Popular with Adolescents on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(17), 10911.
12. Turel, O. et al. (2014) ‘Examination of Neural Systems Sub-Serving Facebook “Addiction”’, Psychological Reports, 115(3), 675-95.
13. 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/ (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
14. Flaminjoy (2023) ‘Influencer Marketing in the Food Industry: The Who, the What, and the ROI’, 4 January. Available at: https://www.flaminjoy.com/blog/influencer-marketing-food-industry-roi/ (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
15. ibid (14).
16. Diresta, R. et al. (2022) ‘It’s Time to Open the Black Box of Social Media’, Scientific American, 28 April. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-open-the-black-box-of-social-media/ (Accessed: 17 March 2024).
17. Ryan-Mosley, T. (2023) ‘Meta Is Giving Researchers More Access to Facebook and Instagram Data’, MIT Technology Review, 21 November. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/21/1083760/meta-transparency-research-database-nick-clegg/ (Accessed: 17 March 2024).