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EU Reporter has published an op-ed by Pietro Paganini exploring an often overlooked factor in the obesity debate: the growing role of digital lifestyles and social media.

Read the full article on EU Reporter or find a summary below.

Over the past decades, lifestyles have changed profoundly. Free time has increasingly become screen time. Activities such as walking, or playing, once contributed naturally to daily energy balance. Today this spontaneous movement has declined, gradually replaced by hours spent in front of smartphones, game consoles, and social media platforms

Yet public debate continues to focus primarily on calories consumed and on how food is produced. Policymakers have analysed, classified, and sometimes taxed caloric intake. Yet energy balance also depends on calories burned.

Scientific evidence increasingly links excessive screen time with reduced energy expenditure, sleep disruption, distracted eating, and worsening cardiometabolic markers. Even an hour of exercise cannot fully offset a day spent sedentary and digitally engaged.

Digital platforms are not neutral environments: they are designed to maximise attention and engagement through features such as infinite scrolling, push notifications, and intermittent rewards that stimulate anticipation and dopamine-driven behaviours.

Several countries are now considering restrictions on social media use for under-16s, mainly due to concerns about mental health and child safety. This reflects an important point: digital environments shape behaviour. Yet this same logic is rarely applied when discussing obesity and cardiovascular prevention.

If policymakers argue that food environments should be regulated because they shape behaviour, a question arises: why are digital environments—where movement is reduced and sleep disrupted—largely absent from prevention strategies? Provocatively, if foods are classified as “ultra-processed”, should addictive scrolling also be classified? Call it Ultra-Scrolling Social (USS).

It is a provocation. The goal isn’t to create new bans or labels. Health is not built through prohibition alone. It is built through balance. Focusing only on what’s on the plate risks overlooking one of the most powerful influences on obesity today: the screen.

Read Ultra-Scrolling Social: The Digital Factor that Obesity Policies Ignore >>>