There is nothing wrong with a sweet treat or enjoying a fast food meal every once in a while. However, there has been a dramatic increase in unhealthy eating across the nation, most noticeably in teenagers and people of a younger age. What is causing these trends?
In the past couple of years, there has been an increase in kids and teenagers indulging in more and more unhealthy eating patterns that can and will eventually harm their health in the long run.
Popular places such as Crumbl Cookie, Starbucks, and McDonald’s are just some of the examples that offer food items that have become a part of the average teenager’s diet. These places all offer foods and beverages that are high in calories, high in sugars, and overall very unhealthy.
Teenagers and other young people are often driven by convenience, peer influence, and social media trends to participate in and indulge in the things they do, but more recently, teens are more attracted to consuming fast food because of the high prices of regular snacks and drinks in stores.
According to the U.S Department of Agriculture’s Food Price Outlook for 2025, the prices for all food are predicted to increase 3.2 percent, and the price for eggs, one of the most often used cooking products and common in most households, is expected to “increase 164.0 percent in 2025.”
“It’s cheap [and] because groceries have been increasing in price, it has been easier to get fast food to fill the stomachs of teenagers,” Lyla Palmer (10) said.
Besides the high prices at grocery and supermarket stores increasingly rising, teens are leaning towards eating at fast food restaurants and more popular social media “viral” places because of influence.
“Mukbang” channels and influencers keep going viral for their consumption of unrealistic amounts of unhealthy food. According to Collins Dictionary, “mukbang” influencers are people who record “a video or webcast in which the host eats a large quantity of food for the entertainment of viewers.” These influencers on social media are one of the influences on teenagers that causes them to eat unhealthily and gravitate towards eating fast food and “popular food items.”
“Mukbang” channels and influencers aren’t the only things on social media that are influencing bad eating habits in teenagers. More fast food places have become “it-spots” where it is a must to eat from there.
“Advertising makes [unhealthy foods] look appealing and trends make it seem more cool or normal [to eat them],” Jensie Chan (10) said.
Taking one of the biggest franchises at the moment, Crumbl Cookie is a cookie chain store that is known for its rotating weekly cookie menu and viral marketing on social media. The cookie store has done collaborations with many influential people, including singer Olivia Rodrigo and viral sensations, The Kardashians, making them more appealing to teenagers.
Unfortunately, these viral cookies are immensely unhealthy, which can cause huge problems for teenagers consuming large amounts of them regularly.
“Those cookies have so many calories. [They] don’t even know,” Palmer, a short time Crumbl Cookie worker, said.
Eating these unhealthy foods can come at a high cost, as they can cause a variety of health problems such as diabetes, obesity, and mood disorders. However, it’s not just foods that can cause these issues–a typical drink from Starbucks, such as a caramel frappuccino, contains more sugar than a small can of soda, and teenagers often drink Starbucks daily.
If teenagers keep their unhealthy food intake at the rate it is now, it will cause nothing but problems in the future.
“I mean, look at Wall-E, how [the characters] do nothing but eat all day and eat in copious amounts, and [they] are basically able to do nothing,” Kara Bauer (10) said.
Despite this unfortunate increase in unhealthy food consumption, there are ways that we can reverse this increase. Teens can choose to drink water instead of sugary drinks and can work harder to try and decrease their fast food consumption.
