Four in 10 American high schoolers reported binge eating at least once in the past month, according to the first national data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected on the behavior, published Wednesday in the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The figures come from the 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a long-running, nationally representative survey of students in grades 9 through 12 that added a binge eating question for the first time — the first national YRBS data on any disordered eating behavior since 2013. Among the roughly 6,900 students who answered the item, 40.5% said they had eaten an unusually large amount of food accompanied by a feeling of being out of control at least one day in the prior 30 days, and 17.2% said it happened on three or more days. Girls reported the more frequent pattern more often than boys, 18.6% versus 15.9%, while rates were highest among Hispanic (20.5%) and Black (18.7%) students and lowest among white (14.6%) and Middle Eastern or North African (9.9%) students. The CDC flagged its estimate for American Indian or Alaska Native students, at 25.6%, as imprecise due to small sample size.
Tied to screen time and mental health
The report's strongest associations were not with race or grade but with mental health and social media use. Students who said they used social media an hour or more per day reported binge eating at nearly twice the rate of lighter users (22.8% versus 12.9%). The gap was wider still for students reporting poor mental health (27.2% versus 14.0%), persistent sadness or hopelessness (25.4% versus 12.8%), and serious suicidal ideation (27.1% versus 15.3%) — adjusted comparisons that held for both female and male students, per the CDC's full YRBS supplement.
The CDC is careful to note the limits of the data: the survey is a single cross-sectional snapshot, so it cannot establish whether heavy social media use or poor mental health causes binge eating, follows from it, or simply tends to occur alongside it. The one-item measure may also have captured ordinary overeating rather than clinical binge-eating disorder, and the agency did not adjust for factors such as household income that could influence all of these behaviors at once.
Still, the authors argue the scale of the finding — reported by a plurality of U.S. teenagers — warrants attention, particularly because disordered eating in boys is often underdiagnosed and overlooked in clinical settings. The report calls for expanding surveillance of binge eating in future survey cycles and for schools to fold eating-behavior awareness into existing mental health and suicide-prevention efforts, including staff training and media-literacy programs, rather than treating it as a separate problem. The CDC says it has not evaluated whether any such school-based approach actually reduces binge eating, leaving that question for future research.