A steady diet of weight loss TikToks may be quite harmful to mental health, a new study finds . Spending a lot of time on the social media platform — especially watching pro-anorexia content — could damage a young woman’s self esteem and increase her risk of disordered eating , according to research out of Charles Sturt University in Australia. “Our study showed that less than 10 minutes of exposure to implicit and explicit pro-anorexia TikTok content had immediate negative consequences for body image states and internalization of appearance ideals,” the researchers said about their findings, published Wednesday in PLoS One .
“Psychological harm can occur for young female TikTok users even when explicit pro-anorexia content is not sought out and when TikTok use is of a short duration,” they added. The app boasts over a billion monthly active users worldwide. Researchers sought out university freshmen in Australia — most of the women recruited did not finish the initial questionnaire.
273 women between 18 and 28 years old ended up meeting the participation requirements. They were surveyed about their TikTok usage, body image and attitudes toward beauty standards while researchers looked for symptoms of disordered eating and calculated their risk for orthorexia — an unhealthy obsession with “pure” or “healthy” foods. Half the participants then watched seven to eight minutes of disordered eating content from TikTok, including young women starving themse.