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Registered dietitian Leah Cahill says people come to her all the time asking about nutrition information they’ve seen on social media.
“Some of it is fine. But a lot of the things that they’ve heard on social media are not safe or not correct,” said Cahill, also an associate professor with Dalhousie University’s department of medicine.
A new peer-reviewed study led by Cahill and published in Canada’s top nutrition journal puts some numbers to the potential quality of information people are receiving online.
Cahill said good nutritional advice has the potential to help prevent diseases, however if people follow recommendations that are not evidence-based, “it can lead to nasty side-effects on the mild end.”
“But [they] can also interfere with medicines that people are on or treatments they might be taking and can be kind of dangerous,” Cahill said.
For the study, a team of nine researchers looked at the qualifications of people providing nutrition information on YouTube. They reviewed 400 videos in total from the top 40 nutrition-related YouTube channels that came up when searching for nutrition advice.
Channels were only included if they had a minimum of 10,000 subscribers and were not corporate-owned.
Fewer than one in four of the sampled content creators identified themselves as being a medical doctor or registered dietitian.
The study also looked at potential financial conflicts of interest from video sponsorships and whether references were cited.
“We were really surprised to see that less than 50 per cent of the videos gave any sort of evidence base for their nutrition recommendations,” Cahill said.
“We really want people to not be deterred from learning about nutrition, but to just critically appraise who are they getting their nutrition information from.”
Veronica Rouse, a registered dietitian in Ottawa specializing in cardiac nutrition care, also has a blog and makes videos for Instagram and YouTube.
Rouse started making content for social media while working with people needing cardiac rehabilitation. She says clients were often coming to her with information they saw online that was not true.
“That … encouraged me to start to create evidence-based information that I put on social media, so that the public has access to correct information that they can use to enhance their heart health,” Rouse said.
Her approach to sharing nutrition information on social media is influenced by her clients’ queries.
“If I have clients asking the same questions, you know, they’re probably not the only ones,” Rouse said. “Then, once I have a topic, I do research to understand what I should share.”
Rouse said there’s a potentially harmful trend on social media of content containing polarizing views about nutrition.
“The information that’s grabbing people’s attention is more about demonizing foods, perhaps, or negative views on a topic that keep people engaged.”
Rouse would like to see future research done on whether people change their behaviours based on information from social media.
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