Four in Ten High Schoolers Binge Eat, CDC Finds

About two in five American high schoolers binge eat in a given month, according to the largest government survey of teen health ever to ask the question. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added binge eating to its biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey for the first time this year, and the results landed like a shock: disordered eating is far more common among teens than national data had ever shown.

The survey of nearly seven thousand students found that close to one in five had binge eaten within the last three days alone. "It was extremely alarming seeing how high those numbers were," said Ariel Beccia, a researcher in the adolescent and children's medicine division of Boston Children's Hospital, who worked with the data. The findings are the first national snapshot of how often high schoolers binge eat, and the first disordered-eating data from the survey in a decade.

A First for the Nation's Teen Survey

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey runs every two years and shapes how the country understands adolescent health. Until now, it had never directly measured how often high schoolers binge eat. This round finally did, and the answers redraw the map of who is affected.

Binge eating showed up more among female students than male students, but when researchers broke down which high schoolers binge eat by race and ethnicity, the pattern startled them most. Black, Hispanic, and multiracial students reported higher rates than white students, while students identifying as Middle Eastern or North African reported the lowest. The pattern matters because it undercuts a long-standing stereotype that eating disorders and disordered eating mostly affect white girls and young women.

"Eating disorders not only affect everyone, they affect marginalized youth more, actually," Beccia said. The data suggests the groups least centered in the public conversation about eating disorders may be carrying the heaviest burden.

What the Numbers Point To

The survey also drew lines between binge eating and the rest of teen life. Students who reported binge eating were more likely to check social media at least hourly, to report poor mental health, and to report suicidality, according to STAT's reporting on the findings. None of those links proves cause and effect, but together they sketch a generation where food, screens, and mood are tangled together.

To understand why high schoolers binge eat, researchers also raised the question of the food environment itself. Nutrition epidemiologist Lindsey Smith-Taillie of UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health told STAT that many widely available foods are designed in ways that encourage overeating, from flavors engineered to fade fast to carbohydrates that digest quickly and leave people wanting more. Cheap, shelf-stable, and heavily marketed, those foods sit in homes in abundance, she noted.

Ashley Gearhardt, a researcher who studies ultra-processed food and addiction, pointed out that binge eating entered clinical recognition around the same time highly processed foods came to dominate the food supply, though she cautioned that the timing does not establish causation. Beccia, for her part, framed the core issue plainly: helping high schoolers binge eat less starts with treating disordered eating as a mental health issue, not simply a food issue.

Why It Matters Now

One reason the numbers stayed hidden so long is money. "Eating disorders are so underfunded and under-studied, in part because we did not have these kinds of epidemiologic data," Beccia said. She hopes that hard national figures on why high schoolers binge eat will finally convince funders that disordered eating is a genuine public health problem deserving real resources.

For teens and families reading these numbers, the message is not panic but recognition. Binge eating thrives in silence and shame, and a national survey saying it touches two in five high schoolers makes clear that anyone struggling is far from alone. That silence echoes a wider pattern: most struggling teens never receive a formal mental health diagnosis, and early smartphone ownership has already been tied to higher eating-disorder risk. Experts say the first step is treating it as a health issue like any other: worth naming, worth taking seriously, and worth bringing to a doctor or counselor rather than carrying quietly.

The CDC plans to keep tracking how often high schoolers binge eat in future survey rounds, which means the country will finally be able to watch whether the numbers move. After a decade of flying blind on teen disordered eating, the lights are on.