Draft:Diet Culture

Diet culture refers to societal beliefs pertaining to food and body image, primarily focussed on losing weight perceived as being excessive, an endorsement of thinness as a virtue and the changing of food consumption. The term is often as critical term for contemporary social standards and their impact on body images and health, primarily of overweight people.

History

Early History

While dieting for health reasons can be traced to Ancient Greece, the movement of dieting motivated specifically by weight weight loss emerged in the middle of the 19th century. William Banting's "A Letter to Corpulence" was a self-published work documenting his weight loss was directed towards white middle-class men and is considered the earliest significant work on the topic.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, a move from plumpness to thinness as a sign of attractiveness in women led to an women's magazines including dieting advice; other social changes include the popularisation of calorie counting as a dieting method, which was originally used for rationing in war time.

The second half of the 20th century, marked the emergence of the Fat acceptance movement, followed in the early 21st century by the body positivity movement. At the same time, there was a wide-spread pressure applied to women to lose weight and remain thin, including through fad diets and public social pressure.

Creation

The term itself likely emerged in the early 2010s, and has since been used to analyse past and current cultural and social sentiments.

The emergence of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic at the beginning of the 2020s and the associated cultural and social changes have led to arguments that a regression of diet culture has taken place.

Use

General use

Diet culture is often used a framework for social analysis and critique. Among the topics primarily discussed is the use of critical terms for foods and their consumption, but also of the impact of diet culture on the social and medical treatment of overweight people.

Correlation with racism

Since the late 19th century, the use of scientific racism as a tool for depreciation of Black people due to their 'exzessive consumption', leading to social pressure to diet particularly affecting black women.

The use of diet culture as an analytical framework of often associated with Intersectionality, focusing on an potentially outsized impact of people of color and connecting it to anti-racism.

The outsizes impact on the body image and mental health of some marginalised groups has been criticised, such as Latino community, generally focussing on the impact of diet culture on traditional foods and social structures.

Sabrina Strings, who is a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued that diet culture is used to enforce existing social hierarchies in a way that disadvantages marginalised groups.

Reception

Diet culture is generally a term used to discuss contemporary approaches to dieting and body images in a critical way. There are concerns that is could promote body image issues, eating disorders and other mental health issues. Commonly, there is a significant difference between what is recommended by healthcare professionals and what social media influencers advocate for.

At the same time, those advocating against diet culture were accused of spreading inaccurate information by denying or minimising the health impact of excessive weight and unhealthy diets. The registered dietitian and research scientist Kevin Klatt, an instructor at University of California, Berkeley, stated that arguments against the link between high body fat and chronic illness are "made up stuff that is a fantasy and a total fairy tale."

In some cases, there seems to be a relationship between exposure to content that is part of 'diet culture' and weight loss. Some argue that the movement against diet culture was co-opted by companies who produce food, with the goal of increasing profit.

See also

• Dieting
• Body mass index
• Intuitive eating