Lately, it seems that every month sees a new harmful trend captivate thousands if not millions of TikTok users.
While this is an unfortunate reality for the platform, it’s also not a surprising one because its popularity and sophisticated algorithms have a way of making people’s ideas spread quickly. And of course, bad ideas are no exception.
But while ill-advised TikTok challenges are nothing new, recent months have seen enough seriously destructive trends spread that TikTok itself has started to crack down on them.
This can take the form of mass deleting relevant videos, but you can generally gauge TikTok’s awareness of a harmful trend by whether they’ve blocked its key search terms from actually showing you any videos.
And the latest candidate for this trend-killing response is particularly concerning because its consequences are potentially deadly.
If you spend a lot of time in the gym, you’ve likely seen your share of pre-workout supplements, which typically come in powder form.
According to a study set to be presented to the American Academy of Pediatrics, these powders vary in their ingredients, but typically contain a high concentration of caffeine and various amino acids intended to boost athletic performance and muscle gain.
Due to their high concentration, these powders are intended to be mixed with water and ingested as a drink.
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However, recent months have a seen a rise in users among TikTok’s fitness community consuming the powders on their own, which is called “dry scooping.”
As study author Nelson Chow described in his analysis of 100 videos collected using the #preworkout hashtag, 31% of the videos he observed depicted this dry scooping method and amassed a total of 8 million likes in the process.
By contrast, only 8% of the gathered videos showed users using the powders according to their instructions.
Although these supplements are explicitly intended for adults, the popularity of TikTok among younger teens left Chow concerned that this trend could have undue influence over “impressionable minors.”
As for why that is such a cause for concern, Chow has cited a list of seriously harmful risks that can occur from misusing supplements in this way.
Some of the risks he mentioned concerned over-consumption of the powders and the their accidental inhalation, which can cause choking and serious respiratory distress.
Indeed, these risks are starting to become clear on TikTok as well, as multiple users have reported being hospitalized as a result of misusing pre-workout supplements.
As we can see in this video, one user even reported experiencing a heart attack as a result of dry scooping.
And it seems that Chow has identified this as a potential risk as well.
As he put it, “This may mislead millions of impressionable minors into improper use of pre-workout, which could lead to respiratory or cardiovascular distress and/or death.”
It is likely that these potentially deadly risks are what led TikTok to block searches for dry scooping, which redirects users to a landing page stating that the term is associated with content that breaks their community guidelines.
It remains to be seen whether this measure in conjunction with warnings from fellow TikTokers will spell the end of the dry scooping trend.
