A few minutes of scrolling on TikTok may show you dozens of beautiful, healthy dishes from cultures all around the world. But do these trendy recipes ever leave the “For You” page?
Research from human-computer interaction scholars at the University of California, Santa Cruz is dissecting how one of the biggest groups of TikTok users — teens — are interacting with healthy eating content on the app. A new study analyzes how their online habits translate into offline actions, and what lessons can be drawn.
They found that TikTok content enables teens to learn more about healthy eating in a transitional period of life, negotiate and learn to cook new meals with their families and independently, and sometimes make long-term changes to their eating habits. These insights could inform designers of both social media platforms and more traditional health-technology, parents of teens who may be interested in their online habits, as well as help lawmakers better understand how teens interact with these platforms as they shape policy.
“For many people, this kind of short media actually gives them a lot of quick knowledge, and helps them to achieve something that otherwise probably wouldn’t be able to,” said Christina Chung, assistant professor of computational media at the Baskin School of Engineering and the senior researcher on this project.
The findings come in the face of worries that TikTok can have negative health impacts on young users. A 2022 study found that food, nutrition, and weight-loss content on TikTok perpetuates a “toxic” diet culture among teens and young adults. In late 2024, more than a dozen states filed lawsuits against the app, alleging it is harming youth mental health by designing its platform to be addictive to kids. The UC Santa Cruz study expands this growing public conversation.
Teens and TikTok
Chung is a human-computer interaction researcher who explores health technology — where it succeeds, and where it can be improved to incorporate a more holistic view of health. While traditional health technologies like meal-tracking or fitness apps can work well to help people create routines and achieve specific goals, they may be less suited for adapting to change and gaining a new perspective on food or health, especially those whose understanding of healthy eating habits is still forming.
“Healthy eating is not a flat thing — there are multiple ways to think about what healthy eating is, and how that fits into you as a person and your lifestyle,” Chung said.
On the other hand, TikTok’s wide range of food content may be a better fit for these needs. The researchers, spearheaded by Chung’s Ph.D. student Ariel Wang, sought to understand how teenagers use short-form videos to learn about healthy eating during a period of life marked by change, while their younger age makes them more likely to be influenced by online content.
Wang conducted semi-structured interviews with teens who habitually use TikTok to learn more about their online and offline habits. She talked with users as young as 13 — the youngest age a person is officially allowed to have a TikTok account.
She found that teens often took both short-term and long-term actions around fast-paced healthy eating content. The majority of teen TikTok users tend to be “lurkers,” who may like and comment on videos but often aren’t creating content themselves. Accordingly, Wang found that teens were often taking quick actions such as liking, commenting, saving, and sending videos to friends and family.
Beyond these short-term actions, the researchers found that teens were taking healthy content offline to experiment with their diets and make changes to their habits. In the mid term, teens often reported revisiting recipe videos they’d saved, and making them by themselves or with friends and family. Sometimes, these videos enabled teens to negotiate with their parents about what they ate, and sparked conversations about healthy eating.
In the long term, many teens would repeatedly make recipes they’d found on TikTok, and marked changes in their thinking around eating. Teens reported gaining more of a sense of understanding about what foods are healthy — even if they were not always incorporating them into their diets. Others noted that they found healthy eating strategies that worked well for them and had become a staple in their everyday lives.
“After they repeatedly do a lot of the same recipes over and over again, they form a sense of how they’re approaching their eating habits, and of what healthy eating is,” Wang said. “Reflecting on those past saved videos or liked videos, they can have a sense of how their healthy eating habits changed and developed over time.”
Designing change
Learning more about these mid- and long-term actions that bridge the online and offline worlds can be extremely useful for technology designers. For example, the researchers found that oftentimes saved videos just stay in the app “collecting dust,” presenting an opportunity to help teens plan for meals. Or, the apps could be enhanced to allow for further reflection around healthy eating choices — such as what foods someone may have been tempted to eat but chose not to — which are very hard to capture with traditional health technology.
Overall, the researchers hope that these insights might help designers, parents, and policymakers to think about ways to help teens build sustainable, healthy habits — whether that be encouraging positive reflection, facilitating collaborative food planning, or offering gentle health tracking prompts.
“Understanding all these processes or strategies, that’s a way for us to think about how we can design technology more intentionally,” Chung said.
This study was published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on Human-Computer Interaction, 2024, and was presented at the 27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2024).
