Eating extreme on the internet as a “fat” problem

Efecan Kültür, a Turkish tap, posted videos almost every day in which he ate tons of food in front of the camera – they were clicked a thousand times. At the age of only 24 he recently died of his obesity. Before that he was in the hospital for a long time (see the following paragraphs).

Kültür is not an isolated matter: essential trends such as Mukbang with large, high caloric quantities or extreme sharpness have occurred repeatedly in recent years, the emergency situations of health in social media users. The reason: the risk of imitation is high.

“Nobody normally eats these portions”
“If the videos are sometimes fake, this can be a real problem,” says Harald Seitz of the German Center for Nutrition. “Nobody normally eats these portions. They can’t do that at all, the body doesn’t do that at all. The stomach is just full at a certain moment.”

It is no coincidence that the phenomenon started in South Korea of ​​all people. After the meals in the Confucian culture of Korea were characterized by strict rituals, food culture has radically changed in recent decades with the rise of the modernization of the country.

Young office workers, plagued by long working hours and short lunch breaks, quickly eat fast food under time pressure. Often they no longer do this in social rounds, as a standard was considered in collectivist society, but only for their laptop.

“Everything a competition”
“In principle, everything is a competition. And a competition often goes into something extremely extreme,” said Christina Holzapfel, professor and head of the research group “Personalized Nutrition and E-Health” in TU Munich. The trends become dangerous if they are underestimated and not classified.

“Everyone can call themselves an expert”
“Ultimately, social media is a platform that people inform about and also get their knowledge and also share information.” There are certainly also positive effects, for example because you can network well. However, the problem is “that every expert can call himself and then these messages are not based on evidence and they do not come from science”, “,

• This dangerous internet hype called Mukbang is originally from South Korea. People consume unnaturally large amounts of food – traditional dishes, comfort food such as candy or fast food – and film themselves.

• The trend happened to be more likely in the nineties: when a gamer was hungry for the popular, Korean streaming platform “Afreecatv” and a cup of instant noodles in front of the camera, this should have been received so well that a number of imitators were found soon.

• The phenomenon consists of the words “muk-da” (ashes) and “Bang Song” (Radio/Sente), and already describes the activity pretty well: you film yourself while eating. Viewers of such programs are usually singles or single people, but because the trend has been around for more than 20 years, many South Koreans grew up with Mukbang programs on TV that time.