In a culture that thrives on competition, food choice and diet have become new ways to indirectly express a sense of superiority. Materialism and achievement trump the desire for community and connectedness in our current climate. Ironically, using food as a proxy can level a playing field that is often skewed from the start. Even for people unable to compete on another level, the perceived virtue of a diet or weight can imply success.
About fifty years ago, the media latched
onto a trend for thinness, often extreme thinness, in women. At a time when the reach of available media first encompassed the entire country, the impact of this preference was much greater than would ever have been anticipated. It began a cultural revolution around women focusing on not just weight loss but extreme weight loss towards unattainable goals.
This shift created a new experiment: sanctioned starvation in the form of extreme dieting. Without any awareness of the repercussions, this dieting exposed a large number of people to the most powerful risk factor for having an eating disorder, prolonged decreased food intake. The concomitant rise in the incidence of eating disorders is no surprise.
In order to maintain its power, the diet industry latched onto other cultural trends and transformed the concept of a diet into the cultural capital of the moment. Currently, the most popular trend conflates dietary choices and health.
Nutrition recommendations refer frequently to health as a source of information to justify diets even though there is scant data to prove these assertions. Food companies like Halo Top propose a way to healthily eat a pint of ice cream. Casual fast food chains like Sweetgreen capitalize on the erroneous concept that salads are by definition healthy. Cleanses propose healthy starvation as a way to detoxify the body. Clinicians create lines of products and diets many to improve overall health or health-related issues like skin or hair.
All of this advice turns out to be diets masquerading as ways to promote health.
With so many people searching for a sense of meaning and value in the modern world, clever and convincing marketing by the diet industry fills a huge void in many people’s lives. Sanctioned starvation provides the answers to many of our questions about how to make our lives matter. The only issue is that the premise is false and the values empty.
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