TikTok's Role in Shaping Cholesterol Knowledge: Khush Kharidia, MD

Khush Kharidia, a third-year internal medicine resident at UT Southwestern, analyzed cholesterol-related content on TikTok due to the platform’s massive user base and its potential for viral health messaging. His team categorized videos by topic—diet, exercise, medications, and disease mechanisms—and found that diet-related content tended to be more accurate compared with content focused on medications and disease pathophysiology, which often spread misinformation. In this first part of an interview from the ASPC 2025 Congress on CVD Prevention, he speaks to both the potential of TikTok and its drawbacks in disseminating accurate health information.

He presented the oral abstract, “Evaluating the Quality, Accuracy and Health Impact of Cholesterol-Related Content on TikTok: A Social Media Analysis,” on day 1 of this year’s ASPC meeting.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What made TikTok stand out as a platform worth studying for cholesterol-related health information?

TikTok has 1 billion users worldwide, and 150 million of them are in the United States. It has a broad outreach and has really picked up in the past few years, and so that was one of the key reasons that we chose TikTok. The second is, as a video-sharing platform, it has lots of information that can be digested into smaller pieces, and so that has a lot of clickbait and viral potential, and that's what we were also interested in looking at. The third is, I really like to look at what past research has been done on the topic. There's been a lot of work in the past few years about people looking at other health-related topics on TikTok and studying them, and so I was kind of interested in seeing how cholesterol would be represented on that platform.

What types of misinformation about cholesterol did you see most frequently, and were any concerning or surprising?

We actually broke up our content categories. We looked at diet, we looked at exercise, we looked at medications, and we looked at disease mechanisms or pathophysiology, and diet was actually something that correlated with accuracy. That was something interesting to learn about, and exercise was only seen in 3% of videos—very seldom discussed and not something we could really get a lot of data from—and so a lot of the misinformation really came from medications and disease pathophysiology. For a couple examples, one I'll give is that there's a common misconception that because myelin in your brain is made from fats essentially, that if you take lipid-lowering therapies like statins and you drop your cholesterol too much that it will precipitate Alzheimer [disease]. That was a big misconception that was really prominent.

The other one was that cholesterol is the building block for hormones and vitamin D, for example, and so people would put 2 and 2 together incorrectly and say, well, if your vitamin D is off or if your hormones are imbalanced, then that's the reason why cholesterol is high and fixing that would fix your cholesterol, which is not necessarily true. Those were 2 common misconceptions that I saw in a lot of videos that were inaccurate or potentially harmful.