A dubious report says memes are to blame for making teens fat

pulse

October 19, 2018 8:01 PM

Loughborough University researchers told a British parliamentary committee that memes may be to blame for teen obesity, saying a lot of them mock fitness and healthy eating. The letter may be part of a trend where Europe is increasingly hostile to meme culture.

Are memes to blame for overweight teens? That's the conclusion researchers at England's Loughborough University came away with, and it wants the government to investigate.

Five researchers at the university wrote a letter to a British parliamentary committee titled "MEMEotive - Analyzing the Effects of Internet Memes on Young Teenagers’ Health and Health Behaviors. It warns them that internet memes cause health risks. Specifically, they write, memes that ridicule "diet and fitness" may also normalize "obesity, poor diet, and sedentary behavior."

"The potential impact of Internet memes appears to be harmful and yet this harm is hidden in images and text," the researchers write in their conclusion.

For example, the researchers cite memes that mock fitness and healthy eating, indicating that the people who make and share them have normalizing eating a lot of pizza and joking that eating chocolate is "healthy eating."

The letter draws a few other conclusions as well. It points out that misinformation is rampant on social media, and that authorities need to be aware about bad health and dietary advice that goes viral.

Furthermore, just as memes can normalize unhealthy habits, it says, cruel ones can also perpetuate ridiculing people who don't appear to be healthy.

"Internet memes may be playing a part in a general apathy towards behaviors that ridicule individuals and groups who display 'non-normative,' 'fat,' 'unhealthy,' 'irresponsible,' and 'at fault'characteristics," the researchers write. "The risks that this poses to future generations and our youth are noteworthy."

The researchers came to their conclusions by studying the sentiment of two weeks' worth of tweets that used t

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