Children exposed to ‘salted ice’ diet tips on Instagram
CHILDREN are able to access extreme diet advice on Instagram – including tips on eating salted ice.
The Facebook-owned platform hosts thousands of images that glamorise eating disorders and encourage users to all but starve themselves.
Teenagers are invited to join private messaging groups to share ‘fasting’ tips. They are also bombarded with advice on hiding anorexia and bulimia from their families and disposing of food unnoticed.
One user posted details of ‘the salt and ice diet’, saying it suppressed food cravings between meals. The revelations come three days after the Duchess of Cornwall warned the Instagram generation against ‘ridiculous’ diets. Camilla said youngsters were damaging their health by trying to be ‘Skinny Lizzies’.
The Daily Mail has found troves of shocking images on Instagram promoting eating disorders, starvation and dangerous fad diets.
Sky News presenter Mark Austin, who has spoken of his daughter Maddy’s battle with anorexia, condemned the content.
‘This is hideously dangerous and more teenagers will die if such content is not controlled,’ he said. ‘I fear that an entire generation is subject to some unregulated social experiment the results of which we may not know for some time. The big companies like Facebook may not have a legal responsibility for what is on their platform but they clearly have a moral responsibility.’
Maddy, 20, is in recovery after her weight dropped dangerously during her battle with anorexia.
Reporters at this newspaper posed as a girl of 13 – the minimum age for joining Instagram – to set up an account under a false name and birth date. It took just seconds of searching online to find pages of posts glamorising eating disorders. The featured women were painfully thin and tagged with motivational words like ‘thinspiration’ and ‘You really can lose weight. You can be THAT girl’.
Another post said: ‘Satisfaction from food lasts for three minutes. Skinny lasts forever.’ Pixie Turner, a nutritionist, said it was worrying that such dangerous advice was online. She added: ‘The idea of eating salted ice to suppress hunger is that the ice gives your mouth something to do, while the salt should reduce cravings. Except it doesn’t work that way, especially if you’re not craving something salty.
‘Engaging in these kinds of risky dieting behaviours like hunger suppression is one of the biggest risk factors for eating disorders.’
Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, said the salt and ice diet was ineffective and unhealthy.
Instagram has agreed to remove graphic self-harm content from its platform, following the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell. Molly’s father Ian said she took her own life after viewing images on the website that glamorised self-harm and suicide.
Instagram last night said it did not allow posts that encouraged eating disorders, but that limited anorexia-related content was important to help sufferers.
A spokesman said: ‘Experts we work with tell us that for many young people discussing their mental health journey, or connecting with others who have battled similar issues, is an important part of their recovery.’
It is investigating the problem accounts flagged by the Mail.