Lakhasly

This section provides a comprehensive review of existing literature on the impact of social media on eating habits. It explores studies that have examined the relationship between social media use and dietary preferences, focusing on how social norms propagated on these platforms influence individuals' food consumption choices. The section also discusses research on the role of online friends in shaping eating habits and the potential benefits of social media as a source of information on diet and wellness.
The use of social media is increasing in developing countries. In 2021, almost 4 billion people are using social media worldwide, a two-fold increase since 2015. In Saudi Arabia, 68% of the Saudi population were active on social media in 2019. Saudi Arabia is among the top countries to use Twitter worldwide. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms today, and it is becoming a very common data source platform, including health related research. The way social media is changing the food habits of people is through advertisements, news, and posts on different platforms. Social media influencers can be defined as famous content creators with many followers, promoting products and services to inspire others. Influencers on social media represent new, independent external advocates who shape audience behavior through posts, blogs, and tweets. The popularity of a social media influencer depends on a more favorable attitude among their followers toward purchasing products and brands advertised by the influencer. In Saudi Arabia, social media influencers mainly promote restaurants that serve high-energy-dense food rather than restaurants serving low-energy-dense food.Developing a negative body image increases eating disorders, including dieting, binging, fasting, calorie counting, and self-induced vomiting, which eventually lead to long-term side effects. Moreover, social media exposure increases anxiety among users, which leads to emotional over-eating. Specifically, maladaptive usage of Facebook has been associated with bulimic symptoms, over-eating, and body dissatisfaction. The issue is that social media content is not regulated nor intensively monitored; therefore, people are exposed to misleading information daily.

Most of the influential social media accounts have many followers. They promote products and lifestyles and share their perception of health and body image messages, often incompatible with health promotion. In this study, 36% of participants followed influencers on social media such as celebrities, coaches, and athletes. Moreover, one-fifth of the study participants were influenced by social media when making food-related decisions. Social media influencers can persuade their audience to purchase products, join movements, follow their advice, and shape attitudes and behaviours. In addition, food advertising on social media works through various mechanisms. For instance, the influencer marketing technique involves the promotion and selling of products or services through social media personalities (“influencers”) who can affect the character of a brand. The sight of food provokes various brain responses related to preparation for food and the desire to eat. In addition, food advertisements are powerful, and brain reactivity to visual food cues has been shown to predict future weight gain and snack consumption in adolescents.Food marketing has convincingly demonstrated that exposure to social media depicting unhealthy products, such as sugar, fast food, and snacks, is directly correlated with high consumption among children and adults. Coates et al reported that social media influencer marketing increases children’s immediate intake of the promoted snack relative to an alternative brand.

Although most of our study participants held a bachelor’s degree or higher (46.9% and 26.1%, respectively), this seemed to make them more liable to fall for false or misleading information shared by social media influencers and other advertisers. In addition, our study also showed that females were more likely to be affected by the influence of social media. This may also be explained by the gender variation in psychology in the use of telehealth, social media, and motivation to use, which was also discussed in the literature.42 Social media can overwhelm people with contradictory information about healthy food. With the amount of information posted daily on social media, it can be challenging for non-experts to distinguish true from false information. For example, our study shows that 26.5% of the study participants rarely read the whole post on social media related to food or nutrition content. This behaviour could give us the insight that when people are unwilling to read the entire post, they will probably not research the given information further. A small percentage of the participants (5.2%) frequently followed nutrition-related content on social media