You might not know the word mukbang, but watch a few seconds of one, and there’s a good chance you’ve seen something like it before:
Lots of food. Really big bites. And the sounds — the crunching, slurping, and chewing — are very much part of the experience.
Mukbangs originated in South Korea, their name combining the Korean words for “eating” and “broadcast.” Some are more extreme than others, but the basic idea is right there in the name: Someone eats, and other people watch.
A whole lot of other people, as it turns out. In a recent study of more than 106,000 adolescents in South Korea, nearly 68% said they’d watched mukbang or cookbang videos (which add cooking to the mix) within the past year. About 11% watched them at least five times a week.
The research team’s main question, though, was the potential impact of all this viewing on oral health. An association was in fact found. The more frequently teens watched mukbang or cookbang videos, the more likely they were to report having had a toothache or painful or bleeding gums.
Among those watching five or more times a week, the odds of both were about 20% higher than among those who didn’t watch at all.
Now, that doesn’t mean mukbangs were causing dental problems. (Let’s face it: That would be kind of weird.) An observational study like this one can only show things happening together or not. It can’t show cause and effect.
Still, the researchers looked for potential explanations of the connection. So they also looked at three eating behaviors that tended to be more common among frequent mukbang viewers: eating fast food, drinking sugary beverages, and late-night snacking. While fast food didn’t seem to make much difference, the other two behaviors did seem to explain some of the connection.
But is it really watching people eat that’s the trigger? Mukbang-watching is hardly the only screen time that’s been linked with changes in how young people eat. Researchers have seen similar patterns with TV, gaming, and other screen-based activities — including more sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods. Some studies have found increased eating even when there was no food advertising involved.
There are a number of possible reasons why. For one, screens can distract us from eating and the usual cues that tell us when we’ve had enough. Eating while watching can easily become habitual. You turn on the TV, fire up a game or movie or binge-worthy show, grab a snack.
And sometimes the screen itself shows us food that looks really, really, really good. Mukbangs just put that last part front and center.
But from a dental perspective, the important question isn’t necessarily whether watching makes someone eat more. It’s what happens when the eating and drinking become something you do by habit, mindlessly, while your attention is being held by what’s on your screen.
There are some kinds of food that your teeth don’t particularly love but harmful bacteria in your mouth do. Sugars are only the most obvious ones. Starchy foods — chips, crackers, bread, pasta, pretzels, or anything else made from white flour — can cause problems, too.
All of these are what are known as fermentable carbohydrates. That just means that the bacteria in dental plaque can use them for fuel. When they do, they produce acids that lower the pH around your teeth. As that environment becomes more acidic, minerals can start to leave the enamel.
Then saliva goes to work. It helps wash away some of the sugars and acids. It also helps bring the mouth’s pH back toward neutral. Once that happens, the enamel can accept minerals delivered by saliva to replace some of what was lost.
With each sip of something sweet or another handful of snacks, this cycle repeats. That’s why nursing and grazing through hours of screen time can be a very different experience for your teeth. Their recovery time is limited.
A systematic review published earlier this year makes the point especially well. Looking at 37 studies involving nearly 60,000 children and teens, researchers found that how frequently kids consumed sugar was a stronger predictor of tooth decay than how much sugar they had overall.
It’s not that the amount doesn’t matter. It’s that the overall pattern matters more. And that brings us back to one of those three food behaviors considered in the study: late-night snacking.
When you sleep, salivary flow drops dramatically. That means there’s less saliva available to do the recovery work described above. If the last part of the evening involves snacking or sipping, you’re essentially giving your mouth one more acid blast before the saliva slowdown begins.
Research in kids bears this out. In one study, families kept track of things like bedtimes, meals, snacks, and brushing for eight days. Among younger children, later bedtimes and more frequent snacking were independently associated with more tooth decay.
This matters even more when you consider how easily screen time can stretch into the very late night hours. This matters for far more than just the mouth. Over time, lack of sleep or disrupted sleep can affect appetite regulation, metabolism, stress hormones, and weight. Excess weight, in turn, can raise the risk of sleep-disordered breathing and obstructive sleep apnea.
Eating habits, screen habits, sleep, and health are all connected. Pull on one thread, and you may wind up tugging on others, too.
Which brings us back to those mukbangs.
It’s easy to look at all that food and focus on the sheer amount of it. That’s part of the spectacle, after all. But when researchers started finding connections between watching these videos and oral health, they found them leading back to everyday life — to the ways something happening on a screen can become tangled up with what we’re doing offscreen.
None of it necessarily feels like a health behavior while you’re doing it. You’re watching a video. Playing a game. Having something to eat. Your body doesn’t experience those things separately, though. Neither do your teeth.
