Diet Culture Isnt Just About Smoothies and Food-Tracking Apps

These days, you can’t get into a conversation about nutrition and wellness without someone mentioning diet culture. It’s all over social media, in both anti-diet spaces and more general wellness ones. Celebrities are calling it out. It’s mentioned in academic research. Even the young teenagers I work with in my nutrition practice use the term. They talk about how their parents don’t keep certain foods in the house, their friend is trying to lose weight, or their coach told them to avoid sugar, “because, you know, diet culture.”

But just because a term is ubiquitous doesn’t mean that it’s universally understood. While many people think diet culture is just about, well, diets, it’s actually far more complex and far-reaching. Diet culture is an entire belief system that associates food with morality and thinness with goodness, and it’s rooted in the (very colonial) belief that every individual has full control and responsibility over their health.

What’s worse, diet culture is so ingrained, especially in Western society, that we often don’t even recognize it. That’s why ishonest asked experts to address some of the most common questions and misconceptions about the term to give you a better understanding of what diet culture really means and why it’s so problematic.

What are some of the roots of diet culture?

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, American protestants started to publicly equate deprivation with health, and health with morality. The most famous example is probably clergyman Sylvester Graham (namesake of the graham cracker, which was originally much less delicious than it is now), who promoted a bland vegetarian diet of bread, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables as a way to quell sexual urges, improve health, and ensure moral virtue.

There’s also plenty of racism and anti-Blackness baked into this colonial idea that thinness and food restriction equal goodness. In her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Dr. Strings talks about how white colonial thought used body size as a way to argue that Black people were inferior. “During the height of slavery in the 18th century, there were prominent Europeans who believed that being thin and controlling what they ate made them morally superior,” Dr. Strings says. “And thus, African people were inherently viewed as inferior, because they tended to have larger bodies, which was equated to being lazy.”

These deeply harmful beliefs are, of course, not true, but they’ve completely shaped the way we think about food, health, and bodies. “Doctors and scientists took this notion that thin, white bodies are superior and figured out how to back it up with science,” according to Dr. Strings. In other words, she says, many of these experts began their research with the biased assumption that fatness was always bad and unhealthy.

Along with health science, this flawed assumption has also taken root in capitalism. “It’s an extremely lucrative business to tell people to lose weight and pretend to know how to do it,” Dr. Strings says. “There’s actually no way that all people who are fat can become thin, and we all know it, but it’s still a multibillion dollar industry.”

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Without access to a car or public transportation, for example, you may not be able to make it to annual checkups; if you can’t afford fitness classes and/ or don’t live near a safe place to walk, it might be incredibly difficult to incorporate regular physical activity into your routine. The notion that we must all control our eating habits in order to be healthy is central to diet culture. But the evidence is clear that what we eat plays just a small role in our overall health.

How does diet culture get in the way of true “wellness”?

This frustration that comes from adhering to diet culture’s rules and not seeing any of the promised results—thinness, but also the moral virtue and general sense of wellness that diet culture vaguely suggests—can often lead to a kind of neuroticism around food that undermines nutrition. “Many people aren’t eating enough calories, and they might also be avoiding very nutrient-dense food groups, like dairy and whole grains,” Harbstreet says. “So diet culture undermines both adequacy and variety, which are the two most important things for good nutrition.”

So what does a world without diet culture look like?

Our perspectives have been shaped by diet culture and we’re surrounded by it all the time, so we often don’t even realize it’s there. It’s literally our norm. This makes it really hard to imagine a world without it, or to break free from it. But it’s fair to say that without diet culture, we’d all have a much better relationship with food and our bodies.

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“Diet culture instills this belief that if humans don’t have ridiculous guardrails around their eating, they’ll eat everything in sight,” Tovar says. But the evidence shows that it’s actually the people who restrict who tend to binge eat, and the people who aren’t on diets don’t because food isn’t off- limits, she adds. Without diet culture, there would also be greater acceptance of all bodies, which would hopefully lead to less guilt and shame, Tovar says. As a result, people would be freer to do things that align with their own values instead of trying to live by diet culture’s rules and conform to its body ideals.

To be blunt, diet culture isn’t going anywhere. Although the anti-diet and fat- acceptance movements are growing, the belief that we’re all meant to control our food intake and strive for a certain body type is still the dominant one —and, again, it’s rooted in systemic problems that can’t be resolved without fundamental social and political changes.

However, as individuals, we can work to recognize this harmful belief system, call it out when we see it, and unlearn it as best we can so we can start living in a way that actually feels good (and stop giving our attention and money to an industry invested in us feeling bad). If you’re ready to start opting out of diet culture—or even just curious to learn more about it—these previous ishonest articles are a good place to start:

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