TikTok Has Gone Too Far for PTs

A new survey finds that a majority of young adults using TikTok implement at least one nutrition fad seen on that platform each week. This disturbing statistic should give pause to physical therapists who share information with their patients or on social media to the general population. Nutrition advice can be powerful and spreading fad diets or misinformation can really have a negative effect on our patients and those listening. In this video I discuss the recent survey and offer some suggestions on resources and what DPTs need to be doing.

Enjoy the video (transcript below), here's the article, and if you like what you see here then know there is more in our 3 board-approved continuing education courses on Nutrition specific for Physical Therapists. Enroll today in our new bundled course offering and save 20%, a value of $60!

Transcript:

Good morning everyone, this is Dr. Wells from Nutritional Physical Therapy and I'm here to talk today a little bit about a press release that was pushed out by MyFitnessPal. If you're not familiar with them, they're a fitness tracker. You can input data and track different nutritional outcomes and things.

Really great website, now kind of been transferred into definitely different wearable apps and things like that. But they did a survey of 2,000 individuals and they were really focusing in on Gen Z and Millennials and the focus was on TikTok. And part of what got me interested in this article was that my wife recently went to her doctor and her doctor was chiming in about certain medical conditions and things and said something to the effect of, well, I think on TikTok I heard something about, you know, this condition causing this.

And I thought, who the hell wants their primary care doctor or surgeon or specialist for that matter, giving them input on what's important for their health based off of what's on TikTok. So anyhow, this survey that they did of 2,000 individuals found that 87% of Millennials are utilizing TikTok to get some form of nutrition information while about 57% of Gen Z are doing the same. Concerning of this data too is they looked at how many of those people actually implement some of these nutrition sort of concepts or ideas.

And roughly 67% of those surveyed try at least one of those nutritional fads or notions, whether it's chia seed guzzling or detoxing with cabbage water. They try, 67% try one per week, which is definitely concerning because while some of those things may not cause major issues like chugging water with chia seeds, some can, right? And we've talked about that in the past with some of our prior posts on utilizing too much ashwagandha, the other posts that we did talking about detox diets like cleansing and trying to deworm yourself with different deworming medications and things. And so now there's definitely a concern that TikTok makes these things, you know, sort of fad and popular.

And these people don't really speak from any position of authority and don't really have any evidence or research to back it up. So I caution those physical therapists out there. Obviously I know sharing this on social media, you may say, well, how do you, how do you, you know, support what you're doing? Well, I utilize things like PubMed.

I use research backed resources like examine.com. And if you haven't used those, or you have questions, and instead of you implementing those things or suggesting those to your physical therapy patients, go to examine.com or go to PubMed and look up the sources before you recommend them to your patients or before you start implementing them yourself. Anyhow, if you want more nutrition content for physical therapists, check out our website. We have three board approved courses are really great. And they're all evidence based.

So we hope you sign up today and look forward to having you and if you pass all three, you get a certificate for nutrition, which is useful in some states to help you out and hope you have a great day. Thanks. Bye.

Keywords:

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