YouTube videos about nutritional care for atopic diseases mostly poor, inaccurate
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Key takeaways:
- 32% of videos were useful, and 65% were misleading.
- Useful videos were considered fair in quality, and misleading videos were considered very poor.
- 93% of misleading videos were created by nonmedical providers.
The information in YouTube videos about the nutritional treatment of atopic diseases tends to be poor and include misleading content, according to a study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.
YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes videos based on viewer engagement, with no peer review, making it difficult for viewers to distinguish accurate and misleading information, Simon Høj, BSc, clinical dietician, Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen in Herlev, Denmark, and colleagues wrote.
The researchers screened, recorded and analyzed the 178 most seen videos about nutrition and atopic disease during a 5-day period in December 2022. Search terms included “allergy diet” (60 videos), “asthma diet” (53 videos), “dermatitis diet” (38 videos), “hay fever diet” (eight videos) and “eczema diet” (19 videos).
Videos with fewer than 50,000 views as well as videos that were not in English or Danish were excluded for a final pool of 91 videos selected for further analysis.
Next, the researchers classified videos as useful, meaning they conveyed scientifically correct information; misleading, meaning they included at least one scientifically wrong or unproven detail; or neither useful nor misleading.
The researchers also evaluated each video via the DISCERN score, which assesses health information as very poor (16-26), poor (27-38), fair (39-50), good (51-62) or excellent (63-80).
There were 29 (32%) useful videos, 59 (65%) misleading videos and three (3%) videos that were neither. Median numbers of views included 120,384 (interquartile range [IQR], 116,234) for the useful videos and 151,527 (IQR, 358,556) for the misleading videos, but the researchers did not consider this difference statistically significant. The videos that were neither useful nor misleading had a median of 207,345 views.
Median numbers of comments included 172 (IQR, 205) for the useful videos and 349 (IQR, 385) for the misleading videos (P = .002). The videos that were neither useful nor misleading had a median of 315 comments.
The useful videos had a median of 1,604 (IQR, 3,795) likes, the misleading videos had a median of 3,277 (IQR, 6,703) likes, and the videos that were neither useful nor misleading had a median of 4,923 likes.
Median DISCERN scores included 43 (IQR, 12), or fair, for the useful videos and 23 (IQR, 9), or very poor, for the misleading videos (P < .001). The videos that were neither useful nor misleading had a median DISCERN score of 29, or poor.
The sources in the misleading videos included nonmedical providers (55 videos, 93%), medical doctors (three videos, 5%) and television shows or YouTube channels (one video, 2%). Also, 74% of the videos that nonmedical providers uploaded and 21% of those uploaded by medical doctors were misleading.
Although videos about nutritional treatment of atopic diseases are popular on YouTube, the researchers said, they include poor quality information as well as a high proportion of misleading content.
The researchers encouraged medical professionals to be aware of these trends and prioritize the production of useful, evidence-based and pedagogic videos that could be used for patient education as an alternative while referring patients to other evidence-based and useful online information.
Perspective
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The findings, particularly that most videos contained misleading information and that the DISCERN score was lower for videos that were misleading compared with those categorized as useful, did not surprise me. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of misinformation on social media, which is consistent with these findings.
I have not personally looked at these topics on YouTube before, but these findings are similar to what I have seen when looking at vaccine content on social media. We have found that content with misinformation tends to get more engagement than factual information, which is concerning.
It is important for doctors and public health professionals to use social media to disseminate reliable information to their patients and for doctors and other professionals such as teachers to work together to promote media literacy education that can help consumers identify misinformation from factual information.
County health departments are often a good source for people in the United States to get credible, relevant information. More doctors and hospital systems are also creating social media channels to disseminate credible information.
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