Proceedings of The 7th International Conference on Modern Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2023
DOI:
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The Relatıonshıp Between Obsessıve Nutrıtıon And Socıal Medıa Engagement
Mustafa Aydın, Ali Erkam Yarar, Bekir Bulut, Faik Özdengül, Aşina Gülerarslan Özdengül
ABSTRACT:
Individuals who are obsessed with healthy eating are encountered more and more every day. Contrary to the diet that many people do to lose weight, individuals who adopt obsessive eating habits by applying strict diets to food groups that they think are harmful to their health also attract the attention of clinicians. Orthorexic individuals with this disease, which clinicians refer to as Orthorexia Nervosa, appear to adhere to the pursuit of healthy food, nutritional planning, lifestyle change, and strict dietary requirements, at the expense of social isolation and withdrawal from life. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, orthorexic individuals, who put healthy food at the center of their life with pathological impulses instead of the thought that the individual desires food more than anything else, may negatively affect their quality of life and health due to their preoccupation with eating, planning, purchasing, cooking and consuming highly healthy food.
With the developments in the digital world, the new phenomenon social media has become an important communication tool in terms of guiding users, rich content it offers, mutual communication and interaction, as well as information sharing on nutrition and health as in every field. The rising trend of social media is increasing in terms of accessing information, sharing information, interpreting and affecting motivational behaviors. We investigated the relationship between social media engagement level and Orthorexia, based on the known effect of communication channels on the shaping of eating behaviors, the spread of food habits of different cultures and the learning of cooking techniques.Within the scope of the research, ORTO-11 scale, social media engagement and engagement in healthy nutrition content in social media scales were applied to measure the effect of social media engagement level on this special bond that orthorexic individuals have with food. It has been observed that 94 participants aged 16-45, who constitute the sample of the research, are those who like healthy nutrition content on social media at a high level, and the results support the relationship between social media engagement and obsessive nutrition.
keywords: Eating Habits, Obsessive Nutrition, Orthorexia Nervosa, Social Media, Social Media Engagement