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TikTok Is Obsessed With Water. Experts Are Concerned

Welcome to WaterTok, where the ice is loud, the vibes relentlessly positive, and the beverages zero-calorie

BY EJ DICKSON | APRIL 14, 2023 | Article Link

“I’m on my second water of the day and it is 11:55, so I am cruisin’ with the water goals today!” Tonya Spanglo cheerily announces in her TikTok video. She bounds over to her “water bar,” a collection of sundry Skinny Mix syrups on a Lazy Susan. Cotton candy flavor? Nope. Dragon fruit acai? Nah, not today. She settles on coconut, mixed with a packet of pineapple flavoring, because, as she trumpets, “Mama’s trying to have a pina colada!” She breaks out her peach-colored, 40 oz. Simple Modern cup, twirls around her straw, and takes a sip before breaking out into Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song).”

Welcome to WaterTok, where the ice is loud, the vibes relentlessly positive, and the beverages zero-calorie. The hashtag, which has about 94.1 million views, features a panoply of upbeat, mostly white women in athleisure with charming Southern accents, showing off their recipes for flavored water in their giant metal Stanley cups. There is peach-ring flavored water. There is Dole Whip-flavored water. There is even banana-split-flavored water, and, perhaps most infamously, birthday cake.

With her messy bun, Oklahoman twang, and relentlessly upbeat manner, Spanglo, who goes by @takingmylifebackat42 on TikTok, is the undisputed champion of the genre, posting her first concoction — a coconut-and-pineapple-flavored beverage mixed with Sonic’s ocean water packet, which she dubs “mermaid water” — in June 2022. “I have been dubbed the queen of WaterTok,” she tells Rolling Stone, as her four-year-old granddaughter plays in the background (later, she will request a sip of water, though Spanglo will inform me that it is plain). Through posting her water recipes on TikTok, she’s garnered more than 700,000 followers, as well as an affiliate partnership with Skinny Mixes, from which she says she gains a 10 percent sales commission with her videos. (A rep for Skinny Mixes confirmed to Rolling Stone that following Spanglo’s mermaid water video, Mermaid sold out a record seven times.)

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Like many other food trends on TikTok, #WaterTok could be seen as relatively innocuous, if not a little silly; many commenters have pointed out that flavored water is essentially juice, or that using artificial sweetener-laden Skinny syrup is not exactly healthy. Others have noted that WaterTok skews heavily white, female, and Southern (a critique that Spanglo, who is all three, dismisses: “Maybe I need to do more research, [but] I do not know where that came from,” she says).

Meagan Anderson, an over-40 lifestyle influencer from Texas who has made her own #WaterTok videos involving collagen, acknowledges that even she was wary when she first saw the trend: “Water seems so simple. And flavored packets have been around forever. It’s basically the same thing as Kool-Aid to someone my age,” she tells Rolling Stone. “It was funny — the younger generation was basically making Kool-Aid come back again, kinda like skinny jeans or parachute pants.”

Yet watching content creators on TikTok playing alchemist with various flavored packets and syrups is admittedly hypnotizing, even if it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. Some experts, however, have genuine concerns about the trend, pointing out that because many of the videos are targeted toward weight loss, the videos could be harmful to those struggling with disordered eating habits.

WaterTok “has the element of danger because it is a classic eating disorderbehavior that happens,” says Jillian Lampert, chief strategy officer for the Emily Program and Veritas Collaborative, which offers comprehensive eating-disorder treatment programs in nine states. “In their fear and anxiety about eating and weight, they try to minimize the calories that come in.” Lampert refers to the practice of filling up on fluids as a means of ignoring hunger cues as “long-term, old-school eating disorder behavior.”

To be fair, not every WaterTok video is hashtagged #weightloss, and the trend is not overtly coded as a weight-loss method. Yet its origins are indeed rooted in weight loss, at least according to Spanglo, who is not the original progenitor of the trend but has certainly done more than anyone else to popularize it. Spanglo tells Rolling Stone she began drinking flavored water as a way to meet her water goals after having gastric sleeve surgery three years ago, with her doctor recommending she drink at least 64 ounces per day to aid in her recovery. She says drinking plain water made her literally ill: “It would make me so full I would puke. You feel like something is erupting in your esophagus,” she says. She had already been using Skinny syrups to flavor her coffee, so she decided to try using them to flavor her water; following her surgery, she has lost more than 220 pounds, she says.

Spanglo says she started posting her water recipes on TikTok last year, with her mermaid water and her “unicorn” water — a mix of a pink Starbursts packet and Skinny syrup’s blue raspberry frosting flavor — racking up millions of views. Along with her general weight-loss content, she now posts water recipes almost every day, most of which get hundreds of thousands of views; after featuring her new clear cup (“so people can see all the colors”) in a recent video, the cup sold out on Amazon within two hours of the video going live.

Though Spanglo says her followers range widely in terms of demographics, she estimates that about 60 percent are gastric bypass patients like her who are trying to meet their water goals. “We have built this weight-loss community and we are all getting healthier and happier together,” she says.

Lampert, however, has concerns about WaterTok, particularly since much of the content is marketed with the hashtag #weightloss. Though, she says, it will likely prove harmless for the majority of those who encounter it, for people who are vulnerable to developing disordered eating habits, “it can very easily be a way for people to feel like they are ingesting food and adequate nourishment when they are not,” she admits.

In addition to the fact that many people with eating disorders drink excessive amounts of water to drown out hunger cues, there are also significant healthissues associated with overconsumption of water, says Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, the CEO and chief medical officer of Within Health, a remote treatment program for people with eating disorders. She cites hyponatremia, a condition that causes low levels of sodium in the body and can potentially lead to cardiac effects, as one potential complication.

“Anything that is egging us on to drink water to lose weight has the potential to take us out of being balanced and thoughtful in our pursuit of health, to doing things that become dangerous,” she says. Though there is a clear distinction between trying to stay well-hydrated (the standard rule of thumb for adults is about 64 fluid ounces, or eight cups, per day) and overconsumption of water to the point of risking one’s health, Oliver-Pyatt cautions that using water as a weight-loss tool makes it easier for people to lose sight of that distinction. “If you’re drinking water to lose weight, Houston, we have a problem,” she says.

That concern is exacerbated by the nature of TikTok’s algorithm, which recommends content to users that they are more likely to engage with, regardless of whether they’re actively searching for it. Due to its algorithm and its relatively young user base, TikTok has come under scrutiny from eating disorder specialists, who have argued that the platform prioritizes potentially harmful content in the form of weight-loss ads and potentially triggering “What I Eat In a Day”-type videos.

In response to this criticism, TikTok issued a policy limiting weight-loss product ads for those under 18, and it has also added a disclaimer to weight-loss searches on the app. When asked for comment, a spokesperson for TikTok noted #WaterTok does not appear to be violative of any of its policies, stating, “content that promotes, normalizes, or glorifies disordered eating is prohibited on TikTok and we remove content that violates those guidelines.”

Nonetheless, despite these safeguards, Lampert says the prospect of falling down a weight-loss-content rabbit hole on an app like TikTok can be dangerous for those struggling with disordered eating.

“From a client perspective, we hear so much [about TikTok], regularly, with clients under 40,” she says. “The story used to be, ‘I heard about this diet from a friend and then before I knew it I was out of control.’ Now, all of the stories start with, ‘I was online and I saw this thing and I got sucked into it, and even when I tried to change my content I couldn’t, and my whole feed was around diet and weight loss.’ That’s really striking to me as a clinician.”

When asked about whether her WaterTok videos promote disordered eating, Spanglo says she never advocates for flavored water as a meal replacement (though she does make videos promoting protein shakes for this purpose), and that she notes in most of her videos and Lives that she is not a trained dietitian or nutritionist. “I’m not telling you what’ll work for you. I’m saying what worked for me,” she says. Anderson says that she is “12,000 percent against” using flavored water as a “cheat or hack”: “I am anti-diet and anti-skipping calories. I am pro giving your body things it needs,” she says. “This does not add to your nutritional needs. It’s just elevating your water.”

Yet with WaterTok booming and receiving media coverage around the world — Spanglo says that within the past 48 hours alone, she received requests from Katie Couric, the Drew Barrymore show, and the New York Post to talk about her videos — it’s easy to see how that message could potentially get lost in a sea of general diet and weight-loss content promoted as wellness.

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“It will help some people because they’ll drink more water,” says Lampert. “But some people will think that drinking birthday-cake-flavored water is the same as eating birthday cake. And it’s not.”

Update 1:40 p.m., 4/14/23: This story has been updated to include comment from a TikTok spokesperson.

#TikTok #WaterTok #Flavored water #Jillian Lampert #Tonya Spanglo #Lifestyle influencer

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