Language in popular American culture constructs the meaning of healthy and unhealthy eating: Narratives of craveability, excitement, and social connection in movies, television, social media, recipes, and food reviews

Reframing Diabetes Prevention: From Body Shaming to Metabolic Reprogramming

This review integrates new developments in psychology with updated physiological insight on the complex relationships among chronic psychological stress (arising from weight stigmatization and body shaming), food composition, physical activity and metabolic health for the example of diabetes. We address how visual measures of health, such as body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio, do not adequately capture metabolic health and can instead contribute to weight stigmatization, chronic stress, and system-wide impairment of metabolic health. We also emphasize the importance of food composition over calorie counting. We summarize how chronic stress interacts with nutritional deficiencies and physical inactivity to disrupt the stress response, immune response, gut microbiome, and function of fat depots. We specifically address how interactions among lifestyle factors and the gut microbiome regulate whether fat stored around the waist has a negative or positive effect on metabolic health. We aim to provide a resource and updated framework for diabetes prevention and health promotion by (i) highlighting metabolic imbalances triggered by lifestyle changes during the transition to industrialized society and (ii) detailing the potential to support metabolic health through access to modest, but comprehensive lifestyle adjustments.

'You Are Not Alone, We've Got You': Power Plays, Devotion, and Punishment on Healthy Eating and Pro-Eating Disorder Websites

Healthy eating (HE) and pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) websites are popular sources of dietary and weight loss information, social support, and lifestyle inspiration. However, the discursive styles and language used by authors/moderators and users of these two site genres have not been widely studied or compared. Forty-three HE websites and twenty-four pro-ED websites were analysed using Fairclough's model of critical discourse analysis. Findings indicate that sites share common characteristics in terms of power relations played out by authors, 'successful' dieters, and those attending these sites. These power plays encourage moral and spiritual commitment to the care of one's body, with authoritative language used to support readers' loyalty and adherence to dietary plans. On HE sites, medicinal properties were attributed to 'clean' or 'pure' foods, whereas pro-ED sites conveyed their importance for weight reduction. Healthy eating sites were largely entrepreneurial, promoting products or themselves. Pro-eating disorder sites typically featured discussions of bodily disgust, the chastisement of others, and self-discipline in the name of 'Ana', such that dieting came to be framed as part of a devotional, often punitive, body project. On both sites, morality discourses were gendered around the thin female body and the 'ideal mother', with occasional praise for muscular male bodies. Our findings indicate how transitioning from healthy eating preoccupations to eating disorders may be facilitated by normalising discussions about restrictive dieting and the shaming of bodies, overseen by self-appointed diet 'experts' and 'buddies' online.

From menus to misbeliefs: Absolute frequencies of healthy and tasty dishes predict the unhealthy = tasty belief in restaurants

We examine whether the prevalence of healthy and tasty food options in restaurant menus leads to the formation of beliefs about the relationship between healthiness and taste that deviate from the correlation of healthiness and taste ratings. Participants (N = 195) rated the healthiness and taste of twelve dishes from two different restaurant types (American and vegetarian restaurants), estimated the frequencies of healthy and tasty options, and reported their health-taste beliefs. Results show that ratings of perceived healthiness and expected taste are uncorrelated in both restaurant types, but participants formed the misbelief that unhealthy dishes taste better than healthy dishes to a greater extent in American than in vegetarian restaurants. Regression analyses revealed that the absolute frequencies of food options were significantly related to participants' health-taste beliefs while controlling for the correlation between healthiness and taste ratings in both restaurant types. Participants were more likely to believe that healthy food tastes better than unhealthy food when they perceived that healthy and tasty food were both frequent (or infrequent) in the respective restaurant type. Our results provide evidence that relying on absolute frequencies, rather than covariation, to infer the relationship between healthiness and taste may lead to misbeliefs that do not reflect the health-taste correlation of individual food items.

Seeing is misbelieving: Consumers wrongly believe that unhealthy food tastes better when there is more of it

Recent studies have shown that people can believe that unhealthy foods taste better, even if healthy and unhealthy foods are equally as tasty. Specifically, when tasty and unhealthy foods are frequent in one context but rare in another, people perceive unhealthy foods to taste better, even if health and taste are unrelated. Given that people often consume food in one context, the current study investigated whether false beliefs about the health-taste relationship in foods can also occur in just one single context, in which either healthy or unhealthy foods are predominant, when there is no contrasting context where the respective other food is predominant. In two experiments (N = 342), we presented participants with pictures of meals from a single context and varied the frequency of healthy and unhealthy foods between participants. Although healthy and unhealthy foods tasted equally as good, participants believed that (un)healthy foods tasted better when there were more of them. This research demonstrates that health-taste beliefs might be changed by increasing the relative frequency of healthy foods in the environment overall, not by just offering some healthy and tasty foods.

Reading, sharing, creating Pinterest recipes: Parental engagement and feeding behaviors

Pediatric overweight and obesity are associated with serious health concerns both during childhood and in adulthood. Visual social media platform Pinterest is often used to curate recipe content, but little is known about how, if at all, parents use the platform as a resource for meal planning for their families. This study focused on (1) describing how Pinterest using parents use the platform related to recipe searches and meal planning and (2) examining the association between parental feeding behaviors and frequency of Pinterest use related to recipes. Survey research firm Qualtrics was used to collect a nationwide sample of 659 Pinterest-using parents with children between ages 3-11 years of age. Data collection was initiated and completed in February of 2019. Measures included both parent and child demographics, Pinterest recipe use and engagement, and parental feeding practices using the Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ). Results showed that 26.9% of the respondents reported using Pinterest daily to read recipes, 17.9% to share recipes; 14.9% to comment on recipes on Pinterest; 10.3% reported creating and posting new recipes; and 13.8% mentioned making a recipe they find on Pinterest daily. Pinterest engagement was significantly negatively associated with parental age and with income insecurity, while positively associated with level of education. Hispanic participants showed higher levels of engagement as compared to White non-Hispanic participants. Among the CFQ subscales, Pressure and Perceived responsibility were significantly positively associated with Pinterest engagement while Monitoring and Restriction were not.