Toxic Messages from the "Health" Industry

I learned from an Anti-Flag lyric booklet that 80% of 10-year-old girls think they are fat. 

That statistic did not skip me. For several years of elementary and middle school, I tore pages from waiting-room magazines that would teach me calorie-burning exercises. I googled and wrote down the calories burned by soccer, biking, downhill skiing, cross-country skiing. I found online tips for how to eat less--watch yourself eat in a mirror, use blue plates instead of red, never eat a serving bigger than your fist. I decided that the most I should eat per meal was around 200 calories, for a total of 1000 a day. I kept a notebook of measurements of my body that I wanted to shrink and weight goals I wanted to reach--less than 100 pounds, ideally, but I thought I could settle for just 100. Starting in first grade, I tried to find out surreptitiously how much other people weighed so I could compare myself. 

And all the way, I resented bitterly the fact that I can’t just skip a meal or live on lettuce the way some people can get away with. I could send myself into insulin shock and die if I stopped eating or dieted severely. I hated that every day in elementary school, the nurse watched me calculate and deliver my insulin based on the carbs my mother had carefully marked down for me, and that meant I had to eat all those carbs or I would end up eating sugar tablets. 

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Eventually, I got myself out of that spiral, more or less. I eat a lot. I don’t look up diet tips or exercises, I don’t count calories, and I try to believe in body positivity and assert to myself that I have every right to take up space. I can’t always believe it, but I am trying. 

Then every now and then, I run into a specter of the brutal nutritional masochism I used to believe in. The last day of an environmental program last week, an invited speaker--a pediatrician, in fact--came to talk to the participants about food, with the overriding message that we are conferring on ourselves a death sentence by eating sugar and chemicals. I’ll call him Chris. His total lack of nuance and class or disability analysis left me astounded and deeply uncomfortable, and with a few thoughts on the “health food” industry. This industry touches everything from the industrial and unhealthy agricultural system; to the marketing that sells us unrealistic beauty standards and diets on one hand and fast food on the other; to the racism, ableism, and classism that undergird the way we think about eating and health. 

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Now, I absolutely think there are conversations to be had about food and chemicals. My favorite book in middle school was Fast Food Nation, after all, and I can still recite a particularly eloquent sentence from it about artificial flavorings. However, talking about the depredations of the food industry and the ways our food poisons us need not be hurtful or lay the blame exclusively on us as consumers. Neither healthy food nor the luxury of choice is distributed equally, and therefore neither can the blame be. 

The doctor, Chris, who spoke at this program acknowledged no such nuance. The first words out of his mouth, about our unquestionable need for all of us to get out of our comfort zones, warned me that this talk was probably not going to be pleasant to sit through. On the surface, being told that getting out of your comfort zone is a good a idea is not necessarily a red flag--so why did it set me off? Because the kind of person who declares that everyone is perpetually limiting themselves by staying where they are comfortable is probably not the kind of person who will acknowledge that for some of us, it’s hard enough to find any zones where we are comfortable, and trying to leave that zone could actually be harmful. 

The lecture worsened from there, veering into the nutrition territory. As he railed against sugar, insisting we would feel better if we ate much less of it, I found I could not sit silently, shaking and furious, and muttered, “Try having a low blood sugar…” Then I asked him directly: “What about hypoglycemia?” 

His advice was that to avoid an insulin spike, someone having a low sugar should eat something slowly absorbed, like beans. Scientifically, this is somewhat like telling someone in anaphylactic shock that they should take aspirin instead of epinephrine. There’s nothing wrong with aspirin or beans in another context, but when someone has veered into danger territory, with an allergic reaction or with hypoglycemia, those response are not just useless but dangerous. I told Chris, “No, actually, if you’re type 1 diabetic and you have a low blood sugar, you have to eat fast-acting glucose and specifically not eat things like beans, or milk, or chocolate, because they won’t absorb fast enough…”

He responded by mansplaining my own condition to me. He made no amendment to his argument that sugar is the devil and by eating it we are asking to die. My point, which he did not listen to, was not just that his prescription for treating a hypoglycemic episode was completely inaccurate, but also that for some of us, sugar is more than something that can kill us--it also keeps us alive. 

Besides the scientific fallacy and exclusive narrative, he was also promoting an insidious, ableist message that, since sugar was to be avoided at all costs, certain people for whom that’s impossible are condemned to live unhealthily; in addition, by evading any discussion of the corporations that pump sugar into our foods, market aggressively to children, sell cheap food to the poor, and use untested chemicals or those with known harmful effects, he placed the blame for the US’s poor health and obesity squarely on the shoulders of consumers. If we don’t eat what and how he wants us to, we’re killing ourselves, and if we can’t eat what and how he wants us to, too bad. 

Food is a universal right and necessity, but it is not inert or democratic. Just as all water sources and safety protocols are not created equal--consider the case of Flint, Michigan--not all people have access to “good” food. Lacking any class analysis, a lecture on what foods are good for us and which are harmful might be nothing more than an information delivery: here are your facts, take it or leave it. 

But the global, or even just US, food system is not an all-you-can-eat buffet, with all our options laid out for us to choose at whim. For all I’m apparently doomed to die because I eat too much sugar, I have the class privilege to be able to shop for fresh and even “organic” food. That’s not a reality for a lot of people, especially those in urban areas, usually low-income and/or communities of color. Places without grocery stores, farmers markets, or other access to fresh, local, or unprocessed foods are known as food deserts. People living in such areas are not actively choosing to eat against their interests. They may not even be unknowingly doing so, but simply because they have no access, geographical or financial, to “healthy” food, the food they eat is higher in chemicals, calories, fat, sugar, and artificial ingredients. The health sadism industry would tell them that they are choosing to kill themselves. What is actually killing them is the work of brutal demography, marketing, and neglect, products of racism and classism. 

One size does not fit all, not for diet prescription and not for clothing. It is not possible to expect--to demand--a poor, overweight person living in a food desert to shop only at Whole Foods and wear a size 6 or under. Yet this is exactly what the health sadism insists upon. Just as there is no acknowledgment that the same eating habits might not--and need not--work for everyone, there is no space in the narrow health mindset for people who exceed a certain weight or possess a certain body type. While being overweight does not automatically equate to being unhealthy, the health industry vilifies and shames such bodies. The doctor at my program not only trotted out the fearmongering about obesity and diabetes but also dredged up that discredited metric, BMI. BMI serves the singular purpose of reducing people to a number and a judgment that may have no correlation whatsoever to their actual level of health. A skinny person can be unhealthy just as easily as a fat one can be in perfect health, but such possibilities go against the narrative that we’re sold, and so instead we are shamed for daring to present a body for which one size doesn’t fit all. 

But blame and shame is what this industry is all about. Until Obamacare, I probably wouldn't have been able to get health insurance when I leave my parents’ plan because of my preexisting conditions; people in general who are deemed less healthy or desirable are offered worse insurance and higher premiums. There’s even a market that’s grown up around this, buying people’s life insurance in the hopes that they will die quickly and turn a profit for the investor betting on their death. For people who don’t fit the standards of health, who don’t have the ability to leave our comfort zones and reach for the so-called “peak performance” that Chris lectured about, our industry and society have made a judgment that we are better left to our own devices, with little support, because apparently it’s our fault. Chris went so far as to derail on some bizarre tangent that ended in the implication that people with mental illness are selfish--an ultimate form of victim-blaming. All the while, while accusing us of being selfish, lazy, or stupid for our food and lifestyle choices, he was trying to situate his comments within the narrative of helping us, educating us, allowing us to see the light and then make our own choices. Such a supportive, unimposing tone might have been his ideal, but tell me again why impartial, well-meant education equates to vilifying people outside the body-type fantasy or with disabilities?

To illustrate briefly that there was no way that this lecture was encouraging or kindly delivered, Chris began by asking if any of us had eaten bread for lunch. I was the only one who hadn’t, not out of conscientiousness around the calories or sugar or whatnot, but because I can’t eat wheat. Chris proceeded to shame all the people who had eaten something breaded by telling us that bread was the single worst food we have and nothing could have been a worse choice to eat, and that we were essentially shortening our lives right as he spoke. 

Perhaps, to give the good doctor the benefit of the doubt, that is technically true. However, it is also true, at least for me, that Chris was rapidly decreasing my mental health as I sat there listening to him, and so in my opinion that does at least as much damage as whatever dreadful items we might have consumed at lunch. 

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A final quibble: although Chris was invited to speak at an environmental program, his talk had nearly nothing to do with environmental issues. He spoke about toxic chemicals far less than he shamed us for eating bread and sugar. Yet food and the environment are very closely linked, and there is a plethora of topics joining the two issues that he could have chosen from, yet he preferred to lecture us on nutrition, accusatory and patronizing, with no regards for the significant sway held by class or disability or anything that might differentiate a person from Chris. There are ways to talk about food and come off as empowering and enlightening, revealing to us the ways we are held captive and manipulated by a toxic food industry, and there’s a whole movement grown up around food justice, discussing exactly what he blithely ignored: that food is not an inert entity and everyone’s choices of what we can eat are not created by the same chef, so to speak. 

Instead of validating the person I was years ago--counting calories and terrified of fat, cursing that I didn’t have the ability to starve myself--Chris could have acknowledged that health is a different place for every person and that we can't all eat or exercise our way there in the same fashion. Without any kind of nuance, the lecture was just a slap in the face from the punitive and ableist nutrition status quo I’ve been struggling to sever relations with for most of my life.