TikTok glamorizes and promotes unhealthy and unbalanced eating habits. The surge of popularity of “mukbangs” in recent years has normalized eating habits that consist of non nutritious foods, overeating, binge eating, and overall unsustainable overconsumption of foods. This way of eating is detrimental to individuals’ health and can result in an unhealthy and unmanageable weight, as well other health conditions that accompany being overweight.
Mukbangs are videos of people eating, typically large amounts of food and talking to their audience while they do so. The popularity of these videos spiked in 2020, around the beginning of the lockdown and Coronavirus.
Grace Derocha, a certified dietician and public speaker on nutrition and wellness, commented to CNN in an interview that, “[the surge of popularity of mukbangs] could be due to viewers watching for some social connection, as if they were sitting across the table from the mukbang creator.”
Over the years, however, the videos have become more and more extreme regarding the types of foods that are being consumed; creators are competing to create the craziest video of consuming larger and larger amounts of unhealthy foods. This trend is unsustainable, not only for the creators who are subjecting their bodies to these foods but also for the viewers who are being influenced to possibly mimic the “meals” that are shown in the mukbangs.
CNN reports that Derocha says “she’s concerned that the more extreme videos could encourage some viewers to overeat, avoid certain foods or fail to eat the various nutrients their bodies need.”
These videos have the possibility to cause serious harm to a person’s eating habits and health.
According to Suzanne Fisher, a registered dietician in Florida, who is also quoted in the CNN report, the worst and most dangerous aspect of the videos are that, “The viewers also don’t know what happens off camera. Some videos could be edited in a way that viewers think the food is being consumed, but the mukbang creator is actually spitting it out between takes.”
This lack of transparency results in visibly “healthy” and “fit” people filming themselves “eating” these disgusting amounts of food, leading to the misconception that they actually eat in that way and maintain a healthy body mass. This misalignment can lead to the idea that someone can eat in that way, and still maintain a healthy figure, which is simply impossible.
Promoting such unhealthy eating is especially dangerous on platforms such as TikTok, where a large majority of the viewers are young, impressionable children. At a young age, it is already difficult to begin to understand your own body and what it needs (from a nutrition standpoint), and being shown misleading videos such as these can have a confusing effect on a young child’s mind.
The opposing argument to my opinion is that these mukbangs are just videos, with the intention to entertain people. I would agree that the intention behind these videos is not malicious, but there is a difference between intent and impact. At the end of the day, there is no reality in which consuming these types of foods is beneficial to any party involved. Is the temporary enjoyment really worth the lasting effects of regularly indulging in foods that will ultimately destroy your health and body? I don’t think it is.
In tandem with the surge in popularity of excessively unhealthy videos, I have also noticed more “healthy mukbangs” being made. These are often more realistic videos of people simply sharing what they would normally eat in a day, as normal people.
I want to be clear that I am not saying that for a food video to be “healthy” it needs to involve strictly salads or counting calories or anything crazy like that. These videos I am referring to are simply balanced, in the sense that they promote realistic meals that offer a variety of necessary nutrients to promote a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
Deep frying an extra large burrito in your car and trying to eat it in under three bites is not a balanced or nutritious meal. Investing in a healthy lifestyle is not about restricting certain foods or avoiding them, it is simply about balance. The mukbangs that I am criticizing have no balance and provide no real nutrition, which is dangerous and detrimental to the people regularly indulging in them.
