Ep. 18: The top 3 reasons social media use promotes overweight in teens
Jun 14, 2023
Dr Jenny Gourgari
Teenagers spend a significant amount of time on social media, mostly on their phones, scrolling through their newsfeeds on platforms such as Facebook, Tik-Tok, IG.
How does social media use can affect risk for overweight?
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
Teenagers spend a significant amount of time on social media, mostly on their phones, scrolling through their newsfeeds on platforms such as Facebook, Tik-Tok, IG.
How does social media use can affect risk for overweight?
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
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Speaker 2:
This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgary does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, dr Jenny Gorgary.
Speaker 1:
Hello, welcome to another episode for the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. In this episode, I will talk about social media use and what is the association of the time spent in social media and body mass index. Now, we know that social media is a big part in almost every teenager's life and the time they spend on social media is likely playing a role in maintaining some healthy and also healthy habits that contribute to having a healthy or less healthy weight. Now, the social media when we talk about social media, we can include Facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter, TikTok. The list keeps increasing with time. But social media has a big effect on what choices we make in life and, in particular, it can have a strong effect in the behavior of teenagers. We know this, we speculate this and recently there was a study done that was published in the Journal of Pediatric Obesity that tried to look into this matter a little more specifically and try to find and capture and measure whether there is an association between the time spent in social media by teenagers and the unhealthy unhealthy weight the body mass index, basically. So in the actual title of this manuscript is time spent on social media use and BMIZ score a cross-sectional explanatory pathway analysis of 10,798 14-year-old boys and girls. So this was a huge sample and that's why I chose to discuss this study because, as I mentioned before, when you have a large sample of teenagers, you're more likely to get to some meaningful conclusions.
Speaker 1:
This study was published, as I said, in Pediatric Obesity in May of 2022 and the analysis of the data was done by Campbell Fubistar and the team in University of Cambridge in United Kingdom, and also the University of Bristol. So in United Kingdom they have some. They have a big cohort of a big representative sample of British children is called the Millenium Cohort Study. It's a birth cohort study of about 19,000 children that began in September 2000. And they have included children that they were born between September 2000 and August 2001. So they chose proportion of this sample and they chose teenagers that they were in early adolescence, between 10 to 14 years of age. So in this sample they had collected data on their body mass index, their height and weight and the amount of body mass index.
Speaker 1:
So they wanted to see whether their weight for height was associated with how much time they spent on social media, and the way they did this was not the best way, but it was the best way that they could have done it. They actually asked all these teenagers to self-report how much time they spent on social media, on applications such as Facebook, twitter, whatsapp, et cetera, and so the response they got they categorized into four categories zero to less than one hour, one hour to less than three hours, three hours to less than five hours or five or more hours. So they collected that data and then they looked to see whether there was an association in boys and separately in girls, between the amount of time they spent on social media and their body mass index. Again, once again, body mass index is just one scientific tool that is widely used by researchers around the world to estimate and make conclusions whether there is an association between a certain behavior and the amount of unhealthy weight. So when they looked at the association between the time spent on social media and the association of body mass index, they found that, first of all, they found no such association in boys, but they did found an association in girls and, interestingly, when they looked at the amount of time spent on social media, how many hours. The amount of boys that were spending less than one hour of social media one less than one hour per day, was almost 44%, compared to almost 23% in girls. So almost the percentage of boys were double the percentage of girls that were spending less than one hour per day. And then the percentage of girls that spent five or more hours per day on social media was 27.9% compared to 13.5% in boys. Now why is this important? Because it does give you straight, right away, it does give you a discrepancy on the time spent on social media between boys and girls. And so when they looked at the association of the time spent on social media in boys with BMI, there was no such association, but in girls there was an association with this particular group of girls that spent five or more hours per day using social media.
Speaker 1:
Now why does this happen, is the one question. So One way that this can happen is because the more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to get exposed to different advertising for food and snacks. You're more likely to go and consume this food and snacks that you are constantly bombarded with. So adolescents may see as many as 900 food advertising in average week. It has been shown in the past and they get exposed to this food cues that can lead to a behavior to actually go and reach for these unhealthy options.
Speaker 1:
The researchers also try to dig a little bit deeply into this conclusion and try to find why does this happen and what drives this association. When they actually put into the equation factors such as the total sleep duration, the presence of depressive symptoms, the body weight satisfaction and the overall well-being, they found that these associations between social media and body mass index were attenuated. So that means that when you spend a lot of time on social media, as particularly more than five hours, that can have an effect on your sleep duration. So you end up staying up late, not sleeping well, and that can affect the ability that you can to make healthier choices, and I've talked about this before in previous episodes. In a way, the exposure to social media has some similarities to exposure that you can have from watching too much TV. So if you haven't listened, I invite you to go and listen to episode five, where I talk more about the effect of TV and the association with weight, as well as episode 16, where I talk about how poor sleep can affect the preference for teens to have more sweet and desserts. So that's also one way that high time spent on social media can affect weight in teenagers.
Speaker 1:
Now another thing is depressive symptoms and body weight satisfaction, because a lot of times when girls spend time on social media, they can find themselves seeing all these images that are not necessarily real. They can be with all these filters nowadays that are available or these influencers that they can go and create and make worse body weight satisfaction issues that these girls can have, and then, when they have worse body image issues through the social media that can lead to unhealthy behaviors and that can make unhealthy weight more likely at the end and also overall well-being from this constant exposure to social media can make you feel that you're comparing your life to all these things that you see on social media that are not necessarily true and that can make you have depressed symptoms and that can affect your overall well-being. It can get you more stressed out so you don't really enjoy life. Instead of enjoying the life, you end up feeling more miserable at the end.
Speaker 1:
Now, what is there's this big difference in the use of social media between boys and girls, and researchers explain this that boys tend to perhaps spend their time by playing video games, compared to girls that spend more their time by making connections and friendships and talking more than boys on social media. So that could be one explanation why and potentially we don't see this association boys because they tend to connect differently than girls. And, of course, it is limitation of this study that they didn't actually look at the teenagers phone to capture the actual time they spent on social media, but they used self-reported data. But when you have to capture data for 10,000 of kids, it may be more difficult to collect actual data. So it's not a perfect study, but it's a good enough method where you can get the information. So what is the take home message from this study?
Speaker 1:
If you're struggling with your weight, consider cutting back the amount of time you spend on social media. It will help you improve your body satisfaction. It may help you with your depression. It can help you make more meaningful, real relationships. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with your teenager, with your friends, with another family, so that someone else can benefit from it too. That was all. I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:
Take care If you enjoyed listening to this podcast. I invite you to come check out the LIFT program. It's Dr Gorgary's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms, where we take all this information, we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier, more confident, less stressed and love their body again. Visit the website at lifestyleforteenscom and click on the work with me and free resources to learn more about this program and get free help to start this journey right away. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens.