The Problem with Food Infuencers
I’ll be the first to admit, I have at times been part of the problem (especially when I was in my 20s and just getting started in my career as a health-minded chef).
Social media is disempowering people’s relationships with food. Rather than making choices based on direct experience, we are trusting influencers, experts, and everyday people with an opinion and a smart phone to tell us what we should and (more often) should not consume.
It would be one thing if this messaging was telling us to avoid processed foods and eat a diet of primarily whole foods (and some of it certainly is, and I’m totally on board with that message), but where the problem lies is that individuals are singling out certain foods or particular categories of food and demonizing them, often based on them containing a single nutrient or anti-nutrient, pseudoscientific evidence, or one person’s negative experience. I’m talking about plant-based foods like whole grains, nuts, vegetables and fruits. In the last month alone, I’ve seen people bashing everything from spinach to cashews to rice.
What is troubling about the trend of social media food evangelism is that people are listening and taking note, often changing their own diets based on messages gathered via social media. A 2018 study in the U.K. found a link between high levels of Instagram usage and orthorexia nervosa, a growing form of disordered eating where individuals exhibit obsessive behaviors in pursuit of a perceived healthy diet, often at the expense of their overall well-being. One of the hallmarks of orthorexia is a heightened awareness of what others are eating. The study also found that over 40% of women surveyed use social media platforms to seek advice about food. So while we cannot conclude that orthorexia is caused by social media (as a social scientist by training I am well aware of the challenges of establishing causation), it is nonetheless very concerning that we live in a time where at the push of a button, we can instantly see what was on the plates both of people we know and trust as well as complete strangers, and can use that information to alter our own food choices if we don’t know any better.
Where I think the danger lies is in the way that this kind of behavior disempowers individuals. I have certainly avoided particular foods and cut out certain classes of foods at times, but it has always been after doing my own research, including careful observation of how a food affects me. I am lucky to have been trained in several modalities, most influentially Ayurveda, to have a toolkit that allows me to assess my reactions to food and to determine how they may or may not be serving my digestive health and overall sense of well-being.
I think there is a rich opportunity to equip people to learn these tools and this is partially why I have personally shifting some of my professional focus to doing more work one-on-one with individuals. And I think there is similarly a need for health-focused social media influencers to share tools that can help people make their own determinations about foods, rather than casting a shadow on a food across the board for everyone. I believe part of why this isn’t happening more is because many of the people sharing “food fear” messaging are simply parroting it off of someone else’s feed.
I’ve made a concerted effort in recent years to avoid language that could lead people to eschew foods that may very well serve them. I’ve done my part instead to share some of Ayurveda’s key teachings around food — namely that one person’s medicine can be another’s poison (i.e., there is no magic food that is great for everyone, and conversely, there are no naturally-occurring evil foods) and that the body is an amazingly resilient work of nature, meaning that even if we occasionally eat a processed treat or something we know our system may have difficulty handling, it won’t be the end of the world if the majority of our food choices include the things that keep our bodies functioning well.
Ayurveda also provides knowledge around certain classes of foods that may be most beneficial to a certain individual’s health, but these should never be accepted with blind faith. There are certain foods on the list of things someone of my constitution should avoid that cause me no harm, and there are certain things I avoid even though on paper they are supposedly beneficial for me. The same should be said for just about any system of food-based healing out there, from Chinese Medicine to the currently popular low FODMAP diet for SIBO sufferers.
In the same way that it is reductive and problematic to reduce a food down to a single nutrient or enzyme, or to get wrapped up in its fat content or carb count, it doesn’t serve our bodies to assume that the foods that do or don’t work for someone else (even if we know we share similar health challenges) will be the same for us. Doing so ignores a whole host of factors including our family origins and associated biomarkers, our current state of health and the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which suggest that our individual life experiences can alter the expression of our genes over time.
There can certainly be value to people facing chronic diseases or similar health challenges connecting and sharing experiences to learn how food can be a powerful form of medicine in restoring health and balance to the body. But we need to do this in a way that encourages every individual to do their own due diligence and to use their body as a laboratory to see what is beneficial, rather than doing things that may not work and may over time worsen certain conditions and leave the body deprived of nutrients.
As a chef, I can’t help but notice that one thing that a lot of the food moralizers tend to miss is that how a food is prepared can drastically alter its ability to be absorbed, digested and assimilated by our bodies. Soaking certain foods (like nuts and legumes) before preparing them leads to a much different experience than eating them right out of a package. Pressure cooking foods can greatly enhance the digestability of many beans and grains. And even the spices and herb we use to season our food can transform something from harsh on the system to very easy to process. When we make blanket statements about a food, we miss all these nuances that arise from how the food is handled.
Let’s celebrate our bodies’ incredible resilience and drop our notions of good foods and bad foods. For every food or category of foods that are being picked apart on Instagram right now, there is likely an entire group of people somewhere on the planet right now thriving on a diet that is primarily comprised of that one thing. The food very well may not be the problem…it may instead be our fear.
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