The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds
Scroll through TikTok or Instagram for five minutes and there’s a good chance a creator will explain exactly what to eat to look the way they do. A flat stomach. Toned arms. That “glowy” skin. The pitch always sounds simple: copy the creator’s diet, get the creator’s body.
New research suggests that pitch is not only oversimplified but often flat-out wrong, and that it tends to come from people with no business dispensing health advice. A team of Australian researchers analyzed 300 videos tagged with popular healthy-eating hashtags on TikTok and Instagram and found that more than two-thirds contained misleading or deceptive information. Most of that content came from influencers with no dietitian training, nutrition degree, or health credential of any kind, while the small slice of videos made by actual qualified professionals, like dietitians, was far more likely to be accurate.
Perhaps the most telling numbers in the study concern who’s doing the talking. Unqualified influencers made up the vast majority of creators in the sample, a status verified by checking public bios and LinkedIn profiles.
That imbalance mattered for accuracy. Across the full sample, 68% of nutrition and exercise information was rated misleading or deceitful. Qualified creators were far more trustworthy: 45.5% of their content was rated accurate, compared with just 4.7% of content from unqualified influencers. Unqualified influencers were also far more likely to post content rated as misleading, 75.2% versus 40.9% for qualified creators, or outright harmful. One example flagged as harmful showed a creator eating a tiny portion of food captioned “I am so proud of myself when I control what I eat.” Another video, titled “How I lost 2kgs in 7 days,” featured a food diary consisting mostly of liquids and portions as small as one date and eight slices of cucumber for an entire lunch.
Somebody with no dietetics background telling millions of followers “eat like me = look like me” carries real weight, according to this research. It’s part of a much larger pattern where healthy eating gets tangled up with appearance, moral worth, and rigid rules, exactly the ingredients tied to orthorexia. For now, the health content surfacing under these popular hashtags gives the loudest microphone to the least-qualified crowd.