"Deadly Influence: How Social Media Is Fueling the Rise of Eating Disorders Among Teens"

Post date: May 9, 2025

By Shaye Gabriel

Anorexia nervosa, known as the deadliest psychological disorder, is promoted to children daily on social media platforms. Whether it is through scrolling on TikTok or looking at an Instagram model’s What I Eat in a Day post, young adults are being introduced to eating disorders and if they aren’t careful they could go down a dark path straight to their death. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, a person dies every 52 minutes from medical complications caused by an eating disorder. Even with this being a well known fact, many people still encourage disordered eating behaviors both intentionally and unintentionally. As a society it is important to be educated on how deadly eating disorders are so that we can work on lowering the growing rate of eating disorders in young adults.

A few of the most common eating disorders are anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder (BED) and it is important to understand that each disorder is different but each of them share one trait: they are all dangerous. The National Eating Disorder Association is a trustworthy source of information about every eating disorder, how they show up in a person, and how they are treated. Although the term is seen a lot especially in recent decades, not many people know the explanation of what an eating disorder really is or what it does to those who have one. An eating disorder is a serious psychological illness that revolves around an unhealthy relationship with food and can cause somebody to restrict or diet, binge and purge, over exercise, etc. The complications from eating disorders involve but are not limited to cardiovascular disease, extreme weight loss or gain, hair loss, fatigue, and even death. From 2000 to 2018 the prevalence of eating disorders globally increased 4.3%.

Some people believe that apps like TikTok are contributing to the growth of unhealthy eating habits. Imagine this, you are a 16 year old girl who has been wanting to lose weight so you've stopped eating lunch. Instead, you go on TikTok where your algorithm is specialized to what you have been searching up the past few weeks, “How to lose weight fast.” This scenario is more common than you may think and social media posts can become dangerous to those with eating disorders. There are users promoting eating disorders such as anorexia by posting tips on how to decrease your appetite, “toxic motivation” videos to keep people wanting to starve, and there are even several trends that have people showing off their bodies while they are underweight from starving themselves. This type of content is damaging because it is almost always intended to give others the need to change their bodies even if that means developing unhealthy habits.

 In conclusion, it is important that people are careful about what they post on social media because the wrong content may lead to the death of struggling individuals. The number of eating disorders will continue to rise with each video promoting them.