The Role of Social Media in Unhealthy Food Consumption and Childhood Obesity: A Review of Current Evidence

Abstract

Social media has become an integral part of children's daily lives. In 2021, the number of global social media users reached approximately 4 billion people. Such personalized and borderless social media platforms are changing people's eating habits through news, posts, and advertisements. Children and adolescents are at a unique life stage that makes them highly sensitive to social influences. This makes them especially vulnerable to marketing strategies on digital media. In fact, the behavior of children and adolescents is greatly influenced by social media and its various users, including friends, influencers, and marketers. Commercial messages are incorporated into gameplay in "advergaming," making it difficult to distinguish between entertainment and persuasion. Concurrently, the global increase in childhood obesity coincides with the marked increases in the food and beverage industry's budget for marketing aimed at children. Nowadays, food and beverage companies can utilize marketing trends that pass for entertainment to reach children anywhere and at any time. Since most of the social media platforms do not fully regulate the promotion of unhealthy meals, the issue is getting worse. Children and teenagers are at risk of being exposed to unhealthy food marketing on social media platforms due to the absence of comprehensive government regulation. Hence, children and young adults are now bombarded with food promotions on these platforms. In this context, the General Authority for Statistics reported that 98.43% of Saudi youth use social media, highlighting the need to study how the use of these platforms and exposure to food marketing affect food consumption patterns and weight gain among this age group (from 5 to 18 years old).