Becareful With Instagram As It Might Ruin Your Kid's Eating Habits

Asking kids to eat healthy foods is always a fierce battle for every parent. While many of them think that letting their kids watching social media platforms such as Instagram is not harmful to their kids, it turns out to be a risk to their eating habits.

According to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics, children are likely to absorb more calories from unhealthy snacks if they regularly watch images and videos of these junk foods on social media.

"The results are supported by celebrity endorsement data, which show unhealthy food endorsements increase children's unhealthy food intake, but healthy food endorsements have little or no effect on healthy food intake," researcher Anna Coate (University of Liverpool, UK) said.

The research was carried out to analyse the effect of social media snack foods marketing on children’s snack intake.

One hundred seventy-six children at the age of 9 to 11 were taken into the examination and randomly divided into three groups. They watched different types of famous Vloggers' Instagram posts with several marketing campaigns for foods.  

While the first groups watched the images of unhealthy snacks, the second one viewed healthy snack posts only. The last group is tested with non-food product posts.

Scientists have measured the effect of unhealthy and healthy food images on participants’ subsequent intake. The estimated result is shocking.

The first group who viewed unhealthy snacks tend to consume 32% more calories than those who don’t watch any food images. Meanwhile, the total per cent of calories intake of the first two groups is 26% higher than the third one. 

Vlogger's Instagram Posts Have Huge Impacts On Kids

The marketing of unhealthy foods, which is spreading all over vloggers' Instagram pages has a massive impact on how children intake energy.

According to Coates, vloggers gain more credits from their endorsements then celebs. Their influences on kids eating habits are more powerful than we’ve thought. Therefore, the parent should be careful with the media contents their children is exposing. We also have to think about restricting unhealthy food promotions on Instagram and other social media platforms.