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As I was scrolling through my Explore Instagram page yesterday, I noticed that over half of the posts I saw were related to healthy eating, nutrition, and exercise. On the surface, Instagram seems to be promoting healthy lifestyles that we should all strive to emulate—even though these posts are making us wrong about our current lives.
Even though I try to eat healthy, exercise, and have a work-life balance, Instagram knows how to use its algorithm to make me feel good when it’s not enough. Every few months, I find that my Instagram is filled with toxic food culture posts that I can’t get rid of unless I delete the app for a while. When I saw that the posts were starting up again recently, I decided to do some research on Instagram’s algorithm and why it promotes toxic food culture.
This led me to the Facebook Files, research conducted by Facebook and presented last year. The study found that Facebook is harming the physical and mental health of teenage girls, among other troubling findings. Despite the knowledge of these results, Facebook hid this information from the public, although in some cases it presented facts that contradicted the results of the studies.
Why is Facebook hiding this? While this study clearly shows that Facebook needs to change what it shows to teenage girls, toxic ads make the app more likely to be used.
The impact of these studies created Facebook and Instagram today. The ability to like, comment, repost, and share other people’s posts greatly increased our interaction with these apps. Creating a Search Page has increased our use of social media, as we interact with more users than just followers. The amount of content available to us is enough to keep people on these apps for hours every day.
Using social media at a high rate can damage our mental health. If you relate to what I said above, you probably look at posts from people at the gym, recipes for low-calorie meals, and “What do I eat a day” videos “. Recent studies show a strong link between people’s use of social media and the risk of developing an eating disorder. This study also found that young users, who are more likely to use Instagram, are more likely to develop eating disorders.
Instagram is promoting disordered eating through the Explore Pages algorithm of teenage girls. The algorithm tracks what posts you interact with, so the posts on your Browse Page have similar content. So, if users interact with an ad about junk food, they are more likely to see similar content in the future. In addition, since marketing on Instagram is still focused on the real body, we often see celebrities promoting foods or dietary supplements that are not approved by the FDA can be dangerous.
So, what can we do to survive this toxic diet promoted by Instagram and Facebook? First, Instagram created a place where its users could see weight loss ads. Other solutions may include setting the time on your phone for the Instagram or Facebook apps. Personally, it’s hard to stop using Instagram altogether; a time limit allows me to use the app at a moderate level and know how much time I use the app. If you’re up for the challenge, try deleting Instagram for a few days at a time. I’m still amazed at how often this app gets deleted!
A toxic food culture is a challenge to avoid in modern society, but it’s important to understand how it affects your mental health and daily activities. Changing the Instagram rules and understanding the algorithm will help us to prevent the culture that is being promoted on Instagram.
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