Mukbang is a global social media trend that originated in South Korea in the early 2010s. Mukbang involves videos of people who eat very large amounts of (often calorie-rich) food in a single sitting. Within these videos (or “Mukbangs”), there is also often an emphasis on vivid sensory qualities such as the sounds of the host eating, and the look of the foods.
Given their rise in popularity around the world, researchers began to investigate the relationship between Mukbang and mental health. Overall, the emerging evidence shows that watching Mukbangs is associated with higher eating disorder symptoms and other mental health risks like negative body image and negative mood. Scholars have theorized that watching Mukbangs may contribute to these negative outcomes by normalizing unhealthy eating behaviors such as eating beyond the point of fullness and eating food primarily for enjoyment rather than to nourish one’s body. Further, Mukbangs might lead to negative body image as hosts often have a very lean physique, making viewers feel less happy about their own body.
One major limitation of this evidence base, however, is that it’s been based on correlational data: In these studies, participants completed questionnaires to measure their consumption of Mukbangs and the other mental health outcomes. While valuable, these data tell us about the relationship between Mukbangs and mental health at one time point, but cannot tell us what came first and what caused what.
To that end, in a recent study, scholars at the University of Melbourne conducted the first experiment to test whether watching Mukbangs can cause an increase in eating disorder symptoms, negative body image, and negative mood.
The Research
In the experiment, 327 young women and men watched a 10-minute Mukbang. Immediately before and after watching it, they completed questionnaires about how they were thinking and feeling in that moment with respect to urges to engage in disordered eating, negative body image, and negative mood.
The researchers then analyzed whether there were significant changes in these outcomes from before to after watching the Mukbang. They predicted that participants would experience an increase in disordered eating urges, negative body image, and negative mood from before to after watching the video.
Key Findings
The key results from the experiment were as follows:
First, contrary to expectations, participants reported a decrease in disordered eating urges from before to after watching the Mukbang. More specifically, women reported a reduction in harmful dietary restraint, and men reported a reduction in the urge to overeat.
Second, participants reported a decrease in positive mood, but no change in negative mood. In other words, participants felt less ‘up,’ but not necessarily more sad or distressed.
Last, there were no changes in negative body image as a result of watching the video.
The Take-Home Messages
While the initial evidence suggested that watching Mukbangs would be harmful for viewers’ mental health, this first-of-its-kind study suggests that this is not necessarily the case. In contrast, watching the Mukbang actually appeared to lower eating disorder symptoms.
The authors theorized that watching the Mukbang may have reduced eating disorder symptoms by relieving some of the shame and anxiety around eating, and by providing a sense of vicarious satisfaction (e.g., watching someone else overeat could reduce one’s own desire to overeat). Moreover, the reduction in positive mood might have been caused by the potential boredom of watching a 10-minute video, when many young people may be more used to watching very short videos on social media.
The authors underscored that while watching a Mukbang may not harm mental health right away, effects might be different when people consume Mukbangs more regularly over a longer period of time. Therefore, longer-term studies that track individuals’ consumption of Mukbangs, and their mental health, across time could help elucidate the longer-term causal effects of Mukbang exposure.
In addition, it is important to note that this first study of the effects of Mukbangs did not include a control or “placebo” group (e.g., a group of participants who watched a neutral, non-food-related video). Without this comparison group, it is impossible to know for certain whether the changes were indeed due to the Mukbang content, or due to other unrelated factors such as the passage of time. Further research using a control group is necessary to provide more evidence for the causal effects of Mukbangs on mental health outcomes.
