A Nation Obsessed with Diet and Nutrition
How we got here and what we can do about it.
Like many others, my relationship to food has been tumultuous to say the least. In the last five years, I’ve tried a variety of restrictive diets (none of which I ended up sticking with) and gained and lost weight a number of times. This struggle with weight and dieting is ultimately what drove my curiosity in the world of food and nutrition and inspired my book, The World at Your Table.
I knew I wasn’t alone in this struggle either. From my family to friends to people in magazines, it seemed like almost everyone was obsessed with dieting and the latest nutrition fads.
So when I started to think about how American food culture differed from that of other countries, the natural first question I had was: How did we get here?
In order to truly understand the staggering American health statistics and our culture of obsessive dieting, it’s important to take a closer look not just at what we eat, but rather our entire food culture.
The website, Lexicon of Food, defines food culture as “the practices, attitudes, and beliefs as well as the networks and institutions surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food.”
Food is so much more than just the food itself. Food represents identity.
Ideas about food are sewed into our culture and psyche. What we eat defines who we are as individuals, communities, and as a nation. You are what you eat.
Beliefs and recipes are passed down through generations, and whether we realize it or not, we associate certain foods with certain groups of people, either by country, gender, class, or race. As Americans, we often choose to moralize food choices, deeming some as “good” and others as “bad,” depending on a range of things from taste to nutritional factors.
Why does all this matter? Because food is the foundation of health. There is no dispelling the fact that if you eat a healthy diet of whole foods, the chances of living a long, healthy life go up exponentially.
But eating a healthy diet isn’t all that simple in reality. As Michael Pollan, a leading voice on American food culture points out, the ironic fact is that as we’ve gotten more unhealthy, we have also become more and more obsessed with dieting.
“Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans. And no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”- Michael Pollan
So where did Americans’ relationship with food go so wrong, and how can we correct course?
It’s a complicated story with its roots in the rise of big agriculture, nutrition guidelines (lobbied and shaped by big agriculture) passed in the late 20th century, and the rise of fast food.
Mark Bittman, food writer for the New York Times, gives a great TED Talk that sums up the story of how our food habits have impacted our health and the environment.
When talking about the creation of the USDA food pyramid, Bittman says:
“What they didn’t tell us is that some carbs are better than others, and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food. But industry lobbyists would never let that happen. And guess what? Half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness.”
The reality is that we have been fed misinformation for most of our lives when it comes to food and health. Big agriculture transformed our relationship to food and the planet, ultimately trading in our health for a profit.
To learn more about the problems of our food culture and system, I highly recommend also watching one of the many fantastic documentaries on food out there like Food, Inc. or Food Matters or reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food or The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
The takeaway from all these sources it that we live in a unique and unusual time when it comes to our relationship with food. No longer is it simple or easy for us to have full control over what we eat like our ancestors did. Instead, we go to restaurants and grocery stores and are presented with more options, and specifically more unhealthy options (for example, added sugars and larger portions) than ever before.
For so long, we’ve beaten ourselves up for not being in control of our relationships with food when in reality, it’s never been our fault. The system is built to misinform, to create confusion, and ultimately, to lead our health astray.
It is time to stop blaming ourselves and instead, re-take control of what we put in our bodies and, in turn, our health. By educating ourselves and spreading that knowledge with our communities, we can create changes to our health from the ground up.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, please follow along as I’ll be posting here each week and going more in depth about all things food and health related. My book, The World at Your Table, is now available for pre-order at this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CHQJ7BP?ref_=pe_2427780_160035660. If you’d like to reach me (I’d love to hear from you!), please e-mail bks48@georgetown.edu.
