Abstract

Social media has witnessed different eating practices, including food mukbang. Food mukbang is a type of video presentation where hosts consume large quantities of food while interacting with viewers. This study is situated on the social eating theory, which explains how people connect their individual interests with society. Though this practice has been on social media platforms for a while now, little is known about its health impact on a wide range of audiences. Unhealthy eating practices are associated with obesity and other chronic diseases, which are the leading causes of death in the world today. Given that there are unhealthy eating practices in food mukbang videos on social media, we collected thirty (30) food mukbang creative common license YouTube videos, and we extracted 2297 comments from these videos to study the trends. In view of this, we found that there is a collection of more unhealthy foods eaten to entertain viewers, different unhealthy eating behaviors such as eating quickly, talking while eating, and putting too much food in the mouth. In addition, we found that the viewers’ sentiments were positive, and they loved watching these videos. Hence, in its best practice, we propose an AI-driven persuasive intervention because AI technologies are capable of detecting unhealthy eating patterns and persuasive interventions can promote a change in behavior (healthy eating behavior). Based on our findings, we present three design recommendations for YouTube and other social media designers to consider in future: (1) using artificial intelligence-related technologies for predicting videos, (2) using natural language processing to prompt feedback, and (3) auto-generating disclaimers at the beginning and end of the video.