You wouldn’t think the Kardashian sisters would be the yin and yang of wellness, the light to each other’s dark, but let me share my favorite episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians: In 2019, the reality TV stars Kim and Kourtney Kardashian fought over an issue that would have puzzled viewers a decade prior. It was so petty and so emotionally charged—and yet representative of a growing sentiment in American households.
In the back of their chauffeured Range Rover, the siblings argued over what to serve at their kindergarten-age daughters’ joint birthday party. And it was getting heated. Name calling, raised voices, and insults ensued. The party theme was Candy Land, but older sister Kourtney—founder of the wellness lifestyle brand Poosh—refused to go along with it. She wanted none of the “nasty” and “gross” gumdrops or lollipops from the iconic board game. There would be no homage to Princess Frostine’s Ice Palace, nor a nod to the bountiful Peppermint Forest. This candy-free Candy Land would present nutritious treats instead of sweets. Maybe even some salads.
Kim, who couldn’t fathom carrots masquerading as licorice, called her health-conscious sister “insane.”
“It’s Candy Land, Kourtney,” emphasized Kim. “It’s not going to be healthy.” The two went back and forth debating whether or not candy canes had to be, well, literal. An astonished Kim accused her sister of foisting a completely “sugar-free, gluten-free, party-free, fun-free zone” on two innocent six-year-olds. “My kids eat at home really, really healthy. And the one day they want a Candy Land birthday party, and you’re saying they can’t have sugar?!”1
Kourtney disagreed, accusing Kim of hurting the children. “You’re dated, you’re in the past,” Kourtney lectured Kim, claiming food coloring “literally” gives people diseases. “Everyone is going to come to this party and everything is going to be disgusting chemicals?!” How can you not feel guilty about that? she asked. Unhealthy food, she added, wasn’t what she “stood for.”
The disagreement continued for several days, to the point where other family members needed to mediate between the two. And it was real: long-term show fans (such as myself) can tell whether a fight is manufactured or legitimate. In the latter, Kim quickly escalates a heated exchange into threats (or actual instances) of physical violence. At one point during “sugargate,” Kim threatened to hit her sister in the face with a piñata.
After refusing to come to a consensus, the sisters decided to break with tradition and settled on separate parties. Though the cousins were inseparable best friends, they were subjected to their mothers’ nutritional divide. Kourtney would serve sugar-free organic cotton candy, while Kim displayed mounds of gummy bears, chocolates, and marshmallows. Later, after the episode aired and viewers took sides on social media, Kourtney tweeted, “I am actually shocked that people are so unaware of how harmful certain foods can be.”
Perhaps no better issue demonstrates the fading trust in Big Food than that of sugar, which has been dubbed the “new smoking,” declared “addictive as cocaine,” and gives new meaning to the danger invoked by the Ghostbusters Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.* There’s no question that too much sugar is an issue in American diets. And as the number of children with obesity has increased tenfold,3 some parents ponder: How do we best feed our families?
But fear of eating the wrong foods can quickly devolve into confusion, extremism—and judgment. In mommy circles, peers can pour the gasoline: Six out of ten mothers of young kids say they have been criticized about parenting, with over half of those complaints centered on diet and nutrition.4 Even Reese Witherspoon “incurred the wrath of the food police” when she shared an Instagram photo of glazed cinnamon rolls for her son’s breakfast.5 “Child abuse right there,” wrote one critic.
If choosy moms once chose Jif peanut butter, now they must choose only the right healthful products to cement their parental reputation.
Cutting out sugar isn’t a fad diet, but it’s just one of several popular food doctrines, along with vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free, or (Paltrow favorite) “clean” eating. The United States saw a 600 percent increase in veganism between 2014 to 2017,6 and 30 percent of all Americans now avoid gluten,7 though only a small percentage actually have Celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity. Cookbook sales grew 21 percent in 2018 partially because consumers were sold on the nutritional superiority of cooking at home versus going out (where presumably unwholesome food awaits).8
Anxiety over nutrition has inspired new food commandments, much like the ever-growing list of lifestyle laws dictating exercise and other practices. Food is no longer neutral territory; strict views have polarized our daily consumption. Within specific middle- and upper-middle-class communities, the message has gone from Try your best to Do exactly this. Talk with the average woman and you will notice a disturbing pattern surrounding what is or isn’t “healthy,” what supplements you should take, how many meals to eat per day, the need for organic … Americans are, quite frankly, a nutritional mess.
“There’s so much information about food being thrown at you, it’s hard to know what to believe and what really works,” writes bestselling author and blogger Vani Hari. “As a reader of this blog, you’re on the right path. I’m showing you how to become the smartest consumers out there.”9
Vani Hari, who goes by the moniker Food Babe, has built an entire empire lambasting ultra-processed food while waging war against Big Food. A charismatic brunette with an inviting smile, Hari is perfectly put together: slim, hair styled in loose waves, unfussy makeup, like one of those cool moms from a Nickelodeon show in designer skinny jeans and a moto jacket. But unlike a Nickelodeon mom, Hari will not offer you a Pillsbury cookie: in fact, this food safety champion won’t invite you to enjoy much of any conventional snacks. To her, “refined sugar is the devil.” She tells fans to avoid artificial dyes at birthday parties. She warned that Kellogg’s waffles are a “disaster for children’s immune system.” She lobbied Starbucks to stop using Class IV caramel coloring in pumpkin spice lattes.
Her other big beef? That those pumpkin spice lattes contain “absolutely no real pumpkin.”10
Hari is not a nutritionist, food scientist, or toxicologist, yet she became a leading health blogger, activist, and one of Time magazine’s “Most Influential People on the Internet.” The former management consultant was revered and feared for demonizing common ingredients found in everything: preservatives, additives, GMOs, and added sugars, all of which she says carry great health risks. In criticizing food companies, she goes hard: “Big Food is deliberately confusing us,” she tweeted. “They don’t want us to know how to eat right.” There’s not much love for regulatory oversight either, for that matter: “The FDA is asleep at the wheel and the Food Industry is in charge.”
She’s right about one thing: it’s a bit odd just how confused we are about a basic biological function (though who is entirely to blame is a bit more complicated). At first glance it seems surprising. After all, weren’t those laminated United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) food pyramids posted in every classroom—telling us to eat our vegetables and fruits like good healthy soldiers—the quintessential guides to healthful eating? What happened?
The iconic food pyramid has played the villain as much as the hero when it comes to clarifying eating recommendations. The nutrition guidelines reshuffled mandates on categories like fats and oils. A failure to define serving sizes or distinguish between types of fat, let alone between minimally processed grains and refined ones (not all carbs are created equal), opened the doors to mass confusion.†
Surprisingly, the pyramid was built on the architecture of a widely adopted (though contested) food theory. In the 1950s, a physiologist named Ancel Keys proposed that heart disease was linked to high-fat diets and high cholesterol levels. To prove it, he studied seven countries, including Greece, Italy, Japan, and Finland. Great travel destinations, no doubt, but the world is bigger than just a half dozen countries. Regardless, the infamous Seven Countries Study’s findings prioritized carbohydrates, discouraged saturated fats, and oversimplified the issue of cholesterol. Eggs were out, cereal was in.
Despite conflicting evidence, it took off.11 Research circles and the media—which were both looking for solutions to the heart disease epidemic—pushed the theory. The government then adopted it for their first dietary guidelines. In 1980, the USDA advised Americans to cut back on red meat, eggs, and dairy products and pile on carbohydrates like pasta, rice, bread, and cereal instead, among other recommendations. The position was solidified into nutritional dogma, then rolled out across companies, schools, agencies, and the media, but not with the clearest communication. The guidelines were often misinterpreted.12
The established viewpoint claimed that if you reduced fat, you would automatically reduce calories because fat is higher in calories than carbohydrates. There was just one problem: once fats were removed from foods, the result was less appetizing. The only way to make the now textureless morsel tasty was to add sugar. Food manufacturers quickly swapped one ingredient for another and capitalized on the health lingo of the day. Suddenly grocery stores were filled with rebranded “low-fat” but sugar-packed snacks, granola bars, and yogurt. That led to what’s been dubbed “the SnackWell effect,” which refers to the psychological tendency to eat more of a food marketed as low-fat.
Based on this logic, Americans became fearful of butter and cheese but embraced “fat-free” muffins. From 1971 to 2000, American women increased their carbohydrate intake by nearly 25 percent, as fat became enemy number one.13 What started as a fight against heart disease ended as a surrender to carb overconsumption.
The ongoing battle between sugar versus fat was further complicated by sugar lobbyists and biased researchers, who weren’t very helpful at preventing this nutrition misunderstanding. In the 1960s, sugar producers paid Harvard scientists to discredit anti-sugar science and downplay its role in heart disease.14 Instead, these researchers (whose pre-existing work, to be fair, already supported these findings) pointed the finger at fat. However, studies show both fat and sugar can contribute to heart disease.
Today, the average American consumes almost 150 pounds of total sugar in one year (the equivalent of six full cups a week). Of that, 66 pounds are added sugar.15 Why? Because it’s in everything. Sugar is in pasta sauce, bread, even salad dressing. It’s virtually inescapable. While other factors contributed to our nutritional issues, it’s fair to say that poorly constructed messaging surrounding the food pyramid ought to shoulder a portion of the blame.
Incorrect guidance wasn’t the only thing leading Americans further astray from the nutritionally sound path. The situation was compounded by pressure placed on food companies to maximize profits, as Wall Street changed the way it evaluated corporations. Long, slow returns on investment gave way to the shareholder value model, forcing corporations to provide higher, more immediate returns on investment. Companies, under intense pressure, were forced to look for ways to sell more; growth became the focus. Gordon Gekko seized the dinner table.‡
Cheap and easily accessible highly processed food took off. Some ultra-processed-food manufacturers also followed what’s been dubbed the “potato chip marketing equation,” selling 90 percent of their products to 10 percent of their customers, many of whom were low-income. They decided that spending marketing dollars going after an existing customer and selling them on increased consumption was more lucrative than targeting new ones.16 Essentially, they’re persuading current clientele to buy not one bag of chips per month, but one bag of chips per day.
Lay’s potato chips slogan “Bet you can’t eat just one!” is therefore actually quite literal. You can’t eat one not only because ad dollars ask you to eat more but also because the product is chemically engineered to be as delicious as possible. Food chemists craft ultra-processed foods to appeal to our biggest cravings—added sugar, salt, and fats—which light up our brains’ reward centers like a Vegas slot machine, researchers suggest.17
As more food was produced and marketed, portion sizes got bigger. Calories in the food supply increased, and people started eating more. The Big Gulp trumped the soda can. Fast-food chains rolled out supersized meals. Restaurants introduced all-you-can-eat buffets. And even standard foods were reworked. The average bagel went from three inches in diameter (140 calories) twenty years ago to six inches in diameter (350 calories) today.18 “We used to eat less, end of story,” Marion Nestle, a consumer advocate and the author of Food Politics, told me.
The industrial food revolution and fast-food dependency clearly affected eating habits. A modern American consumes more than 3,600 calories each day, a 24 percent increase from 1961, in part because highly processed foods and snacks make up to 60 percent of their diet.19 Just 7 percent of American adults meet the daily recommendation for fiber (because fiber is found in foods like beans and lentils).20
Granted, not all processed food is bad for you. Processed foods lie within a spectrum. Some foods are lightly processed to prevent spoilage or boost mineral content, like canned vegetables, whereas others are ultra-processed and packed with sugars, salt, and additives. But the latter is usually far tastier and hence more popular.
It should be noted that the 1980 dietary guidelines advised minimizing added sugars, advice that Americans ignored.21 In all fairness, how could nutritionists compete against Big Food’s billion-dollar marketing budgets? Our childhoods are marked by McDonald’s Happy Meals and Pop-Tarts advertised on television. We can’t recall too many cartoon characters shilling for vegetables (except maybe the Green Giant, but he was drowned out by the party-loving Kool-Aid Man). Even today, more than 80 percent of food advertising—nearly $14 billion—promotes fast food, soda, energy drinks, chips, and candy.22
As enticing as it may be to squarely blame the original faulty science, our modern food environment—cheap, processed food available at every turn, from the gas station to ubiquitous food vending machines—does need to be considered. We never stood a chance. In time, we all started to realize it.
Awareness of issues with processed food took off in the sixties, when the growing natural food movement—think hippies, communes, and food co-ops—confronted the mainstream food industry for its greasy grip on consumers. Young baby boomers voiced their dissent through what they ate, wore, and believed. By revolutionizing their private life, the conscientious rebel would also transform “the system.” Rejecting the mass-produced hamburger was, in its own way, a radicalized act. And so brown rice wasn’t just brown rice—the sticky grain was an act of defiance.
Healthier eating produced a new kind of discernment that motivated reformers to rally against agribusiness and their parents’ kitchen. And “unlike sporadic anti-war protests, dietary rightness could be lived 365 days a year, three times a day.”23
It was more than just disgust at McDonald’s beef patties. Food politics were part and parcel of a larger shift in societal attitudes toward mass industry. People were fearful of nuclear war, toxic waste, and environmental issues and saw many issues reflective of industrial failings. Corporate manufacturers proved they couldn’t always prevent damaging ingredients from seeping into a hamburger. Tainted, contaminated, or misrepresented food sparked skepticism then and continues today.
Meanwhile, media exposés reinforced suspicions that government agencies aren’t fully invested in nutrition but are smoking cigarettes in bed with food lobbyists. Reports confirmed the USDA is under constant pressure from meat and dairy groups.24 The USDA is obligated to promote food commodities, thereby facing intense opposition whenever it wants to recommend a decrease in any food group in dietary guidelines. At a Senate hearing, former Illinois Republican senator Peter Fitzgerald characterized this blatant conflict of interest, “like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.”25
Even the health associations and leading nutritionists no longer carry the weight they once did, in part due to their participation in paid endorsements or studies sponsored by bigwigs like Coca-Cola. In 1988, the American Heart Association (AHA) raised money for research efforts by selling a “heart-healthy” label to food companies eager to capitalize on better-for-you marketing. A product only needed to meet a specific requirement for levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium. By labeling single foods as “heart-healthy,” it “distorted basic principles of good nutrition which depend on overall dietary patterns,” writes Marion Nestle in Food Politics.26 Many sugar-laden cereals boasted the AHA seal of approval. Shoppers scanned the grocery aisle and wondered, How the hell is Trix healthful?
Then there are the food scandals. Here is just a sample from recent global headlines: Chicken from some major fast-food chains might contain only 50 percent chicken DNA.27 Mars recalled chocolate bars in fifty-five countries over “fears that customers could choke on pieces of plastic.”28 Consumer Reports found that 97 percent of chicken breasts sold in retail stores contained potentially harmful bacteria (often the result of fecal matter contamination).
Though rare, such debacles seep into the American psyche. In one 2020 survey of five hundred consumers, less than half said they trusted the overall food industry. Instead, 77 percent of respondents said cooking in their kitchens was the best course of action.29 And when health-conscious consumers shop, they’re pickier; almost half considered whether a product was processed before heading to the cash register, according to a Nielsen report.30
Women not only learned not to take the word of Big Food on what to eat, they started having nutrition meltdowns like never before, spinning a revolving door of restrictive food rules. Which led to even more confusion. When it comes to nutritional guidelines, harsh restrictions like Kourtney Kardashian’s “healthy Candy Land” rule for her kids are extremely clear. But are all the restrictions deserved? Or accurate?
Flashback: Yearning for Nutritional Nirvana
In a Depression-era ad for Post Bran Flakes, a young girl named Sally is mercilessly mocked by schoolmates for her dismal report card. Turning to her mother, she finds little refuge. “Sally Lennox! I’m ashamed of this report card. What will your father say?” the mother lectures the child.
But not so fast, the reader learns. The mother is the villain here. The problem was not caused because young Sally didn’t study. Instead, the selfish mother is to blame. For you see, it turns out the poor grades were the result of constipation … from not eating enough cereal. “Maybe you have a little girl like Sally,” the ad reads, laying the guilt on thick, “and perhaps like Sally’s mother, you have been unjust to her.”31
Starting in the 1920s, national government campaigns coupled with women’s magazine articles stressed a very specific nutrition mandate, reinforcing the idea that fortified foods (products with added nutrients) were “necessary” for a normal healthy life. Some brand campaigns relied on scare tactics, like Grape-Nuts cereal, which suggested that a cereal-poor diet puts children at risk of “unfortunate personality traits” like shyness and self-pity.32 In time, nutrition was imbued with a sense of morality and elitism, claiming to ensure good nerves, composure, energy, beauty, and steadfastness. Health, essentially, secured one’s future prospects.
This messaging reached deep into women’s maternal core, causing utmost anxiety and thereby frantic obedience. No mother would refuse Grape-Nuts, lest her child turned into Eeyore.
Taking aim at children’s success was a calculated action. Advertisers were “fascinated” by a growing competitive struggle—specifically, how it played out with parents dissatisfied with their own ambitions. Brands discovered that parents could be pushed to pass their anxieties and quashed aspirations onto their children. In effect, the next generation was coerced into actualizing their parents’ disappearing dreams and pummeled into competitive one-upmanship.33
This collective guidance led to a nerve-racking quest for nutritional perfection in the fifties, equating a morning bowl of cereal to extra tutoring. Vitamins were synonymous with health, even though consumers knew very little about food chemistry. Women were told to put their faith in experts and nutrition gurus, for fear of gambling with the family’s fragile health, as Catherine Price documents in her book Vitamania. “Americans of both genders embraced the notion that careful homemakers had a responsibility to ensure that their families—through food and, later, supplements—had enough of each,” writes Price. “How much was enough, though? Nobody knew.”34
While shoppers rack their brains over what to eat, many seem to be certain about one thing: they want their whole foods to be organic. Despite the extra cost and often reduced shelf life, in certain circles, organic is the new given. Sales of organic foods more than doubled between 1994 and 2014.35 I too favored organic for several years. It sounded right. Why wouldn’t I want the “healthier” option?
The problem is that organic is a description that seemingly confuses the consumer as much as it supposedly clarifies what should or shouldn’t be on their dinner plate. Is organic the same as “natural”? Does it mean GMO-free? It turns out that 23 percent of consumers think “local” is synonymous with organic.36 (It’s not.)
Not to mention that the health benefits of organic are—and I know this might come as a shock—nowhere near as proven as most consumers would like to think.
Many women I’ve interviewed switched to pricier organic after reading the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list, a shopper’s guide to produce that purportedly contains high levels of pesticide residue and therefore should be avoided. Every year, the EWG announces which misbehaving fruits and vegetables made the naughty list, prompting mainstream media outlets to publish which conventionally grown produce is “in” or “out.” It’s ubiquitous to the point where we don’t even question it.
In 2021, the EWG warned that “imazalil, a fungicide that can change hormone levels and is classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as a likely human carcinogen, was detected on nearly 90 percent of citrus.”37 This was all very scary-sounding! Who wants evil chemicals lounging on their fruit?
The thing is, organic farms also use pesticides and fungicides to ward off pests and fungal disease. They’re less discussed because they’re “organic.” Organic means derived more from natural substances than synthetic. But “natural,” as we have learned, doesn’t necessarily always mean better. Organic farms generally try to minimize pesticide use, and some of their pesticides are gentler than synthetic ones, but they can sometimes be less effective, leading organic farms to use much more of the organic pesticides in order to achieve the same results.
As for conventional pesticides, the science might not overwhelmingly support a reason to switch for health reasons. I’m focusing on the health benefits here, understanding full well that people choose organic produce for other substantial reasons, including animal welfare and planetary concerns.
Carl K. Winter is a toxicology expert and professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, Department of Food Science and Technology who specializes in pesticides. He says researchers have consistent data demonstrating that the very tiny presence of pesticide residues on most conventional foods is far too low to constitute a health threat. Winter investigated the EWG’s 2010 Dirty Dozen list, homing in on the specific exposure to the ten most frequently detected pesticides on each discouraged fruit and vegetable. His researchers concluded that typical exposures to chemicals on those particular foods were at “infinitesimal” levels. “For most pesticides, if we were to feed consumers ten thousand times more pesticides in their diet than they’re getting, those levels still wouldn’t be of health concern,” explains Winter. “It’s the amount of a chemical, not its presence or absence, that determines the potential for harm.”
The EWG’s imazalil claim—the one that warned about fungicide on citrus plotting against us? Their interpretation is partially based on extremely high doses.38 A 150-pound adult could consume more than eight thousand conventionally grown nectarines in one day without any ill effects even if they contained the highest pesticide residue recorded by the USDA. Scientists criticize the EWG for scaring consumers with “deceptive” sensationalized warnings that distort the science.39 Several scientists told me the same thing: the organization blows things out of proportion. Mind you, the EWG is not merely inflating the danger to the size of a birthday balloon; they’re inflating it to the size of a Goodyear blimp.
Toxicologists I spoke to attack the EWG’s Dirty Dozen for what they deem a dubious, arbitrary methodology that ignores the basic pillars of toxicology. The three principles of risk assessment—toxicity of the individual pesticides, consumption rates of these foods, and actual levels of pesticide residues detected on foods—don’t seem to have been taken into consideration. The EWG (which, again, is partially funded by the organic industry, including Organic Valley, Stonyfield Farms, and more) readily states as much if you dig into their website: “The Shopper’s Guide does not incorporate risk assessment into the calculations. All pesticides are weighted equally, and we do not factor in the levels deemed acceptable by the EPA.”
Now, studies have found that organic produce does indeed have a lower presence of pesticide residue. That could be because organic farms use pesticides after exhausting nonchemical methods, including crop rotation, among other reasons. But does that mean it’s much “safer” to consume than conventional veggies? Not necessarily. There’s no doubt that most pesticides, both synthetic and organic, are potentially dangerous, especially for farm workers exposed to high doses in a work environment. The issue I’m discussing here, however, is whether the level of pesticide residue in regular produce—after it’s been rinsed—should be of concern.
The FDA announced that nearly 99 percent of foods sampled and monitored in 2019 showed pesticide residue levels “well below” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) safety standards, while 42 percent had no detectable residue levels at all. According to the FDA, results confirmed that residues “do not pose a concern for public health.”40 This is not to say that there isn’t room for improvement in FDA regulations, just that experts agree it’s inaccurate to label conventional produce as “unsafe.”
Okay, but what about the nutrition factor? More than three-quarters of consumers who buy organic are “looking for healthier foods.”41
There’s not enough information to meaningfully conclude how organic foods benefit overall health. To start, observational studies following eating populations are quite difficult to decipher because, for example, if one cohort ate organic and were less likely to develop cancers, was it due to the food consumed? Organic eaters usually have access to better health care, exercise more, and suffer less stress than those without the means to afford such food. So how do you prove causation and not correlation?
Food consumption studies are also extremely difficult (and often fundamentally flawed) because they’re short-term and not controlled: they’re generally self-reported. Unless you keep thousands of people cooped up in a lab for years, it’s hard to determine whether they’re actually eating what they say they’re eating. That is, if they can even remember what they ate.
We do have research, although scientists are mixed on the inconclusive evidence. A 2012 Stanford University meta-analysis study of 237 existing studies (basically, a study of studies) compared organic to non-organic counterparts, only to conclude that, overall, they “showed no evidence of differences in nutrition-related health outcomes.”42
Other studies suggest higher levels of nutrients in certain organics. A 2014 meta-analysis study based on 343 previously published studies§ found that organic produce contains a 17 percent higher concentration of antioxidants than conventional crops.43 Published in the British Journal of Nutrition, it was reportedly intended as a scientific reply to the 2012 Stanford study. But while antioxidants are associated with health benefits, they are not synonymous with it, especially since there’s a wide range of antioxidants. As one of the lead researchers told the New York Times, “We are not making health claims based on this study, because we can’t … [the study] doesn’t tell you anything about how much of a health impact switching to organic food could have.”44
The researchers also found that organically grown crops produced lower levels of proteins and fiber than conventional produce.
The question remains: Are there significant health differences between organic and conventional? There is a strong general consensus among nutritional science experts I spoke to: that consuming organic food has no considerable health benefit. Even the USDA pauses before staking a claim to benefits. The Washington Post asked Miles McEvoy, the former chief of the National Organic Program at the USDA, a very simple question: Are consumers right to think that organic food is safer and healthier? McEvoy was evasive, replying, “The question is not relevant.”45
The organic industry is betting on consumers conflating farming standards with supposed health benefits. More specifically, they’re counting on moms worried about properly feeding their children and made fearful of overhyped pesticide risk (more on that in chapter 12).46 As far back as 2001, General Mills—having acquired organic lines such as Small Planet Foods—was quite forthcoming about their tactics. In a New York Times piece by Michael Pollan, General Mills marketing executive R. Brooks Gekler acknowledged that Small Planet Foods targets “health seekers” even though he doesn’t know if organic is healthier. “At first, I thought the inability to make hard-hitting health claims—for organic—was a hurdle,” Gekler offered. “But the reality is, all you have to say is ‘organic’—you don’t need to provide any more information.”47
What Gekler meant is that brands don’t need to actively mislead shoppers. At this point, consumers fill in the blanks with their assumptions all on their own.
We might assume certain things about organic because there’s a lot baked (so to speak) into our views of food. When NPR ran a report on the Stanford study, they got so many complaints (“prompted a powerful reaction,” is how they put it) that they had to run another segment just to address the backlash. In an attempt to calm down listeners, they interviewed NPR’s social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, who is also the host and creator of the Hidden Brain podcast. He said something that applies to many of the things we buy or do: strong emotional values are tied up with organic food. It has come to represent so many other things—anti-industrialization, good parenting, nature, spirituality—that might not have anything to do with these studies’ findings.48 “There are these tensions between what we want organic to be at a psychological level, and what it actually does at a practical level,” says Vedantam. “And the science is very good at telling us at the practical level what’s going on. But sometimes, that could feel like the science is attacking our values.”49
Normal nectarines aren’t keeping nutritionists up at night (at least the ones I spoke to). What does worry them is far more practical: organic’s scare tactics could make people more fearful of consuming conventional produce and may lead them to consume less produce overall. Indeed, here’s what sometimes happens with some lower-income shoppers: nervous and confused50 about pesticides—and too cash-strapped to afford organic—they end up skipping the produce aisle altogether. A small 2016 study of five hundred low-income shoppers’ habits indicated that some planned to consume fewer fruits and vegetables after being alerted of pesticide residue concerns such as the crudely named Dirty Dozen.51¶ As the Washington Post speculated, the EWG “may be doing more harm than good.”52
Because of our current nutrition discourse, those without the means or time to devote to an all-encompassing clean/organic/“superfood” lifestyle believe healthy living remains unattainable. This is especially true for those who do not have access to fresh organic food, or the time to prepare it.** The price of organic food varies from 5 to 100 percent more expensive, though on average, it hovers around 47 percent pricier than conventional alternatives, according to a Consumer Reports study. (Granted, organic produce is becoming more affordable and on rare occasions, it’s actually cheaper than conventional produce.)
In one Facebook group for natural parenting, a moderator asked moms who eat 90 to 100 percent organic to share how much they spend each week. Quite a few were forthcoming about the challenges of trying to live their best Goop life:
“Ugh, I want to eat like that but I just cannot afford it!”
“I want to do better for my family food-wise, but geez, the prices are crazy!”
“We don’t buy all organic because of this … We can’t afford it. So we do half and half. The kids’ stuff is mostly organic and then we eat the cheap gonna-give-you-heart-disease stuff.”
“It’s almost like supermarket shaming,” says Winter of the two-tiered class of produce shopping. “We’ve got enough stress in our lives right now. We don’t need to invent additional ways.” Already, lower-income individuals consume fewer vegetables than higher-income groups.53 Given that 90 percent of Americans fail to eat the recommended intake of produce, the food toxicologist shares only one piece of advice: “Just eat your fruits and vegetables if you’re really concerned about health and don’t worry so much about whether they’re organic or conventional.”
Health is obviously not the sole reason consumers choose organic produce. Organic can also taste better or fresher to some people. And taste is not to be discounted; for certain individuals, more delicious produce inspires them to eat more of it. Consumers are also influenced by production values, zeroing in on farmworker safety or environmental reasons. (The latter are also debated.)54 These are legitimate, important concerns that aren’t raised half as much as the health claims.
Although, if you’re buying organic from Whole Foods—owned by Amazon, which generates millions of pounds of plastic waste per year—to “help the environment” … you might want to reconsider your patronage.55 You’re probably better off buying from regional producers (whether their food is organic or not).
Answering the question, What produce should we buy? is complicated. You’re measuring a host of issues spanning environmental, financial, nutritional, and farmworker safety that go well beyond the conventional versus organic binary. I am in no way advocating against organic or suggesting it doesn’t have merit. I am simply questioning a marketing-led narrative that has been so ingrained in our culture even though the science is more complex than advertised. Should we be made fearful about consuming “toxic,” i.e., regular, produce when the evidence suggests otherwise?
Meanwhile, you’ll notice that conventional produce is increasingly resorting to its own marketing tactics. It’s why you might spot an apple with a sticker reading, “100% fresh!” or “All natural,” hoping to compete against organic’s seductive branding.†† We’ve turned our supermarkets into a screaming match of flashy good-for-you labels. Everyone is pressuring us into nutritional choices. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there—information from what should be trusted sources that just continues to proliferate.
Sifting through breaking news from nutritional researchers can prove just as challenging as navigating food labels. From a young age, Americans witness an ever-changing nutritional landscape that treats food like some sort of Whac-A-Mole game. One day avocados have too much fat, the next they’re the crown jewel of any worthy millenial’s toast. Red wine might be heart-healthy, but maybe it just correlates to a Mediterranean diet. Depending on the weather, red meat is a good source of protein or will usher in a cancer apocalypse.
This dietary nitpicking inspired the parody publication The Onion to opine, “Eggs Good for You This Week” but they “may be unhealthy again as soon as next Monday.”
Having worked as a producer at NBC News for seven years, I can assure you that no one in the newsroom is afforded the time to sit back and consider what all this information cumulatively does to the audience. Many news organizations suffer from a lack of resources and staffing, forcing journalists to hammer out pieces at breakneck speed. Junior reporters grab viral items from social media or newswire offerings based on attention-grabbing headlines or top audience interests. I vividly recall laughing when some provocative food study would come across a newswire service vehemently contradicting a previous one. “Those perform well,” an editor would chime in, pushing me to publish.
Journalists don’t want to crank out a sludge of meaningless and contradictory stories, but they’re forced to when clicks reign supreme. It’s a lot like a factory farm in that if you ever saw how the media sausage is made, you’d likely put your fork down.
But this trend has been going on for a long time, and across media. Listening to the radio or reading a magazine without being bombarded with the latest nutrition discovery or a debate on keto vs. paleo is near impossible. We’re subjected to a constant tug of war over what we should and should not consume, with experts duking it out under sensationalized headlines.
At the Goop conference, I listened to panelists who depicted one’s refrigerator as a nutritional minefield. According to one Goop expert, certain fruits, vegetables, and beans are reportedly harmful to the body because they contain “toxic” plant proteins called lectins, which supposedly do not want to be eaten. Lectins are apparently plants’ clever answer to predators (that is, us) and cause inflammatory reactions that result in extra pounds and serious health conditions, such as “leaky gut syndrome.” This panelist had written a book about how plants are quite literally trying to kill us with poisons, essentially likening the produce section to Little Shop of Horrors. Lentils, edamame, and eggplant are some of the many forbidden foods that over time will make you “very, very sick.” And tomatoes—watch out, they’re inciting “chemical warfare in our bodies.”
After this talk, women were discharged into a food hall featuring twenty booths from L.A.’s top health restaurants. It was a cornucopia of bountiful vegetables, spruced-up fruits, and berry chia pudding cups—Willy Wonka’s factory for Erewhon devotees. Alas, all the ingredients they were just warned about awaited them. Tomatoes! Edamame! All the big no-nos! What hell hath Gwyneth wrought?
Some attendees wondered aloud: “Should we, as we just learned, not eat?” Another sighed audibly to her pals, “Wait, what’s safe here?”
A relentless torrent of food rules doesn’t simplify women’s lives but clutters their minds, drains their wallets, and confuses them to the point of paralysis. Roughly 80 percent of all Americans wrestle with conflicting nutrition information, and of those, nearly 60 percent admit that it makes them doubt their choices.56 They stand in the grocery aisle pondering: Which frozen entree will do the least amount of damage? (Those who counter with “get out of the frozen aisle!” should keep in mind that many working women might not have the time or resources to cook from scratch.)
The conflicting information compounds “nutritional schizophrenia,” a new-findings ping-pong that propelled the Washington Post to declare even back in 1984, “Nothing lasts. No assertion has a shelf life of more than 11 months.”57 There’s no consistently reliable source of information. No definition of healthy is fully agreed upon. Depending on whom you talk to or even what culture you belong to, a variety of different definitions exist.
If people feel like they can’t rely on magazines or soup cans, they’ll latch on to strong leaders who do seem worthy of our trust. Or those that, at the very least, cut through the crap and just tell us what to do already.
Food Babe blogger Vani Hari has an enticing story and stark before-and-after photos to go with it. She tells the tale of a busy working adult too time-strapped to eat anything but takeout and junk food until her typical American diet—“candy addict, drank soda, never ate green vegetables”—landed her in the hospital. She then spent “thousands of hours” researching chemical production in popular items and changing her diet.58 Hari learned how to cook, ditched processed food, went organic, and says she eventually saw health issues like eczema clear up. She also lost thirty pounds.
Hari credits the changes in her diet for the transformation. She’s become an advocate for investigating what’s in your food and detecting “the lies we’ve been fed about the food we eat.”
She proclaims she’s no longer duped “by big business marketing tactics” or confused by complicated labels. Offering similar salvation to fans, Hari tells them precisely what to avoid, calling out specific brand products and entire ingredient categories. Like Beautycounter, she’s also on a mission for more transparency, placing pressure on conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch to divulge or remove what she considers hazardous ingredients. Through online activism (namely, mom-fueled petitions), Food Babe tries to get the “bad” stuff off shelves.
Hari has amassed more than a million Facebook followers, also known as the “Food Babe army.” She built this legion by hitting moms where it hurts: their children. In 2015, Hari led a petition for Kraft Foods to ditch “dangerous” artificial food dyes in its iconic macaroni and cheese. These additives, she wrote, were “contaminated with known carcinogens,” caused an increase in hyperactivity in children, and were linked to long-term health problems such as asthma. After the petition garnered 360,000 signatures, Kraft begrudgingly obliged. Hari comes across as a health-conscious David taking on the Big Food Goliath, a crusade that’s catnip for moms.
Even those of us without kids started paying attention when Hari began making the rounds on morning news shows and cable TV stations like CNN. The activist grew to be the face of women who care about food.
Hari, like many successful influencers, understands the obvious: Outrage works. Fear sells. Here are just a few of the headlines that led her lifestyle website over the past several years:
Is This Weedkiller in Your Favorite Hummus Brand?
Do You Eat Beaver Butt?
Don’t Poison Santa!
Does Kale Destroy Your Thyroid?
Sparkling Water Contaminated with Chemicals Linked to Eczema, Immune Suppression, Cancer, and Birth Defects Are You Getting Conned by Cheap & Toxic Chocolate?
The point isn’t to convey a nuanced scientific argument. It’s to tap into the public’s fear of “chemicals.” Or as she once told ABC News, “When you look at the ingredients [in food products], if you can’t spell it or pronounce it, you probably shouldn’t eat it.”59
Most famously, Hari started a petition against Subway to remove the chemical azodicarbonamide—which is used to condition and whiten dough during the baking process—from its bread. Hari warned it was linked to a who’s who of health issues: respiratory issues, allergies, asthma, tumor development, and cancer. She then dubbed azodicarbonamide the “yoga mat chemical” because it’s something that is also found in rubbery objects. “North Americans deserve to truly eat fresh—not yoga mats,” she railed.
Calling it a “yoga mat chemical” leaves the impression that we’re munching on gym products, which is presumably what Hari intended. But chemicals can have multiple uses across industries, and that in no way invalidates their safety—in the same way that we don’t stop drinking water just because it’s also found in dish soap. It’s an irrelevant fact, but as soon as readers saw that exaggerated association, it was hard to undo. Then the media ran with the “yoga mat chemical” line because, well, it makes a darn good clicky headline.
Hari painted a vivid scene of just how “dangerous” this chemical is, citing a 2001 incident in which an overturned truck carrying azodicarbonamide prompted city officials to issue a hazardous materials alert and evacuate nearby residents. “Many of the people on the scene complained of burning eyes and skin irritation as a result,” she wrote. First of all, this was a large spill, and therefore heavy exposure to a raw chemical, which is not comparable to the minuscule amounts found in food production. Furthermore, Hari conflated the chemical’s use in products with aerosolized exposure. Those accident bystanders and factory workers who might be subject to direct airborne exposure are at risk when raw azodicarbonamide is inhaled. That has no bearing on its physical use in bread baking. You could launch the same attack on flour: that too is a respiratory irritant that can cause lung damage.60
The tiny, nearly negligible amount of azodicarbonamide used in the processing of bread does not pose a health risk, according to scientists I interviewed. I’m not insisting on a need for azodicarbonamide, but what’s problematic is how influencers present these facts and terrify the average American. This is why Hari is controversial: though she might be well-intentioned and justifiably mistrustful of the food industry, her calculations miss the mark, devolving into nothing more than worry porn.
Hari claims many common ingredients will “destroy your gut” and cause a host of health problems. If, as she suggests, American pantries can increase risk of cancer, reproductive problems, and thyroid dysfunction, then the onus is on her to prove that. As it stands, the “worrisome” ingredients she cites are generally heavily tested and proven safe in their intended use.
And it’s not just food that Hari goes after: she had also previously lambasted the flu vaccine as “a bunch of toxic chemicals and additives that lead to several types of cancers and Alzheimer disease over time”—an accusation without adequate substantiation.61
Hari is one of many influencers targeting “toxic” grocery carts with not always proven claims. With the death of the expert and nutrition information descending into chaos, wellness gurus and cookbook authors swooped in, sticking their flags in the ground to claim authority. Problem is, a lot of the information they offer is skewed.
Hari has defended her extreme views by arguing that moderation never leads to change. (Or fortune, one might argue.) “People chastise me for being too simplistic,” she told the Atlantic, “but it’s like, okay, how are you getting through to people?”62
Food rules give us order. Like Karl Lagerfeld committing to starched white shirts and fingerless gloves, taking out whole food groups or abolishing sugar (but, oddly, permitting monk fruit or agave, sugars by another name) offers simplicity in what’s become a complicated nutritional mess. You can devote precious brain cells to anything but your dinner plate. Having someone else figure it all out for you provides a mirage of safety, as does the ease of tuning out whatever debatable information comes down the six o’clock news pipeline.
But there may be another motive at play in telling people exactly what they need. Like plenty of other bloggers, Food Babe makes money with affiliate marketing. When Hari recommends “clean” or organic brands, she gets a cut of the sales. As for products for which she professes not to have found a suitable alternative elsewhere—such as snack bars or deodorants—she offers replacements from her own organic brand, Truvani, made “with ingredients that you can trust.”
Her biggest line is that of supplements meant to round out what is supposedly our crappy diet. She sells turmeric tablets to “support” healthy joints and weight loss; plant-based pills to “support” immune health; and ashwagandha that “supports” brain health, among other supplements and powders.
You sure see the word “support” an awful lot in wellness branding, but never the words “treat,” “cure,” or “fix.” There’s a reason for that (and it’s not because influencers don’t have a thesaurus). “Support” is vague enough for them to promise you something without really guaranteeing anything. It’s a clever marketing term that helps brands evade full responsibility, because how can one define support? What measurements could one use for that? The same goes for ambiguous terms like “ease,” “stimulate,” “boost,” or “promote,” which do not specifically claim to prevent or treat a health condition.
Sneaky terminology is one of many issues plaguing the behemoth that is the supplement industry, which feeds on those who believe they’re at a loss with just a sensible diet alone. So many supplements either hint to an edge on average health, or they invent reasons for people to assume they are, on their own, not healthy enough. The more we’re marketed to, the more we believe we’re “not well.”
Paving the road to nutrition with supplements has generated big business not just for the likes of influencers such as Vani Hari, but for the industry overall. The $50 billion supplement industry went from 4,000 available products in 1994 to 50,000 in 2019. More than 75 percent of all American adult women take a multivitamin or supplement regularly, despite ongoing skepticism from the scientific community.63
Now, some people have legitimate nutrient deficiencies and are prescribed very specific supplementation by a health professional, such as during pregnancy (folic acid) or for conditions like osteoporosis (calcium). Vegans might need some extra B12. People certainly have gaps that require supplementation. But that’s not the average pill popper.
The general consumer doesn’t seem troubled by the fact that many of their over-the-counter vitamins might just be mere placebos or that “energy” pills often owe their effect to stimulants like caffeine—hardly miracle pills. Supplements notoriously lack the more rigorous regulations imposed on pharmaceutical drugs because they don’t require FDA approval before being marketed. The FDA does not monitor whether these products work; the agency just flags whether they’re safe to consume. Manufacturers can therefore make vague health claims, like “boosts digestive health,” that are not well defined and lack accountability.
In a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers compared clinical trials over five years to determine whether regular vitamin intake protects against cardiovascular disease. In evaluating multivitamins, as well as vitamin C, vitamin D, and calcium supplements (the most common supplements), “none had a significant effect,” reported the authors.64
Numerous researchers cast doubt on this American morning ritual. A 2019 NIH-funded study analyzed data from nearly thirty thousand U.S. adults over a six-year period. The subject population was generally healthy: they ate a nutritious diet and were physically active. They skewed white, female, and with a higher level of education and income.65 Researchers concluded that popular dietary supplements—multivitamins, vitamin A, vitamin K, magnesium, zinc—had no measurable benefit and no influence on their mortality. Any nutrient boosts came from food consumption.66 “It’s pretty clear that supplement use has no benefit for the general population,” noted Fang Fang Zhang, the study’s senior author and an associate professor at the Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy. “Supplements are not a substitute for a healthy balanced diet.”67
Plenty more studies have investigated whether supplements impact chronic conditions and just overall health. Too many come up short in proving substantial benefits. As Steven Nissen, the chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, concluded, “The concept of multivitamins was sold to Americans by an eager nutraceutical industry to generate profits. There was never any scientific data supporting their usage.”68
Many consumers don’t even know what’s in them. Due to a lack of sufficient oversight, supplement ingredients are often not accurately reflected on the label. One 2018 study published in the journal JAMA analyzed the FDA’s tainted supplements database between 2007 and 2016. Researchers found 776 instances in which supplements were tainted with unapproved pharmaceutical ingredients, steroids, or other contaminants. (Some contained sildenafil, the active ingredient found in Viagra.) The FDA issued voluntary recalls for a little under half of them.69
Or better yet, a Quartz report discovered that Goop supplement ingredients were awfully similar to those sold on Infowars, the far-right website owned by “Sandy Hook is a hoax” conspiracist Alex Jones. They’re branded differently—Goop vitamins go by Why Am I so Effing Tired? while Infowars prefers the more aggressive-sounding Brain Force Plus—but both rely on Ayurvedic-heavy ingredients like the medicinal plant herb bacopa. Unfortunately, bacopa doesn’t score too high on efficacy: “The science, based on animal studies, shows some preliminary—but contradictory—evidence of improvements to memory and brain function,” read the report.70 “There is minimal support for the claims about epilepsy and anxiety.”
The general supplement consumer is bewitched by the marketing because it sounds great: supplements are easy and promise faster results. Taking them sounds better than what’s actually necessary: eating nutritious meals and committing to big, concrete lifestyle changes. We are prone to buying what we want to believe, and we want to believe in quick solutions.
But no magic pill can replace a solid diet, stresses Craig Hopp, the deputy director of the division of extramural research at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the NIH. “You can’t eat crap and take a multivitamin and expect to be healthy. It just doesn’t work that way,” says Hopp. Vital stuff like fiber shows up in what we eat, not what we pop out of a bottle. Hopp sees this insta-quick mentality stemming from a pill that does indeed promise fast, revolutionary results: “You took antibiotics and poof, you were better. It was magic. And I think the incredible success of antibiotics really contributed to people thinking that, well, there is a pill for everything.”
Dr. Danielle Ofri, an author and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU, views the supplement industry a bit more suspiciously. The physician believes the industry preys upon desperate patients who don’t feel as though they have other options. Many supplement companies take advantage of the fact that medicine is complex, ambiguous, and imperfect and that we don’t have cures for all chronic illnesses. “It’s never that easy in real life,” says Dr. Ofri, “so it’s hard, as a physician, to explain that our options for your diabetes are actually quite complicated.”
Dr. Ofri’s clients, mostly women, are typically very suspicious of taking prescription medication, but that initial suspicion drops to zilch when it comes to supplements grabbed off a Whole Foods store shelf. Dr. Ofri tries to explain that you should be suspicious of anything you take, “whether it’s from a health food store or that I prescribe. You should ask the same questions, have the same concerns.” These patients do their homework, but they either don’t know how to interpret research or it gets muddled by effective labels like “clinically proven.” That sounds good, but what does that mean? Who conducted the research? (Was it the brand?) Was there a placebo group? Where were the results published in a peer-reviewed journal?
“The vast majority of dietary supplements, if they had to be a hundred percent truthful in their advertising, wouldn’t sell anything,” says the clinical exercise physiologist and nutritionist Bill Sukala. Terms like “promotes good health,” “detox,” or “gently cleanses” have no real medical definition, while “clinically proven” is not regulated. They can mean anything and are therefore meaningless.
It’s not just supplements. If you, like so many women today, are indeed concerned with the microbiome, you might opt for probiotics, which quadrupled in use between 2007 and 2012 and propelled kombucha into a billion-dollar industry. Most likely you’ve done so because brands like GT’s Kombucha promise to not only “support gut health” but also “rejuvenate, restore, revitalize, recharge, rebuild, regenerate, replenish, regain, rebalance, and renew” your overall well-being. This is part of the growing “better for you” food trend, in which botanical extracts, probiotics, or “immune-boosting” ingredients supposedly greatly improve our health.‡‡
There’s some exciting new research on the microbiome, but it’s not there just yet. Nutrition experts will tell you a probiotic-infused cookie or bottle of kombucha won’t do much of anything. A healthy gut needs fiber—fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
Kombucha lacks scientific evidence for its aggressive claims, thereby receiving a thumbs-down from medical professionals. Even the alternative health scene isn’t fully sold on it: celebrity doctor Andrew Weil downplays the hype, concluding, “The sugar and caffeine may be responsible for the energy some consumers claim they feel … I do not recommend kombucha, but if you like it, drink it.”71
Fantastical marketing is not an anomaly, nor is it new. Jamie Lee Curtis told us we’d poop better in those probiotic-endorsing Activia commercials (parodied by Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live in 2008). Then suddenly the ads disappeared. Ever wonder why? Well, parent company Dannon had to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising. The yogurt maker agreed to pay $21 million for advertising that Activia is “clinically proven” to relieve irregularity—claims that it could not substantiate.72
Sukala doesn’t have too many kind words for the wellness industry’s tactics. As he says, “the business is money. The storefront is ‘health.’”
Today, three-quarters of consumers are actively cutting back on sugar,73 and an increasing number of shoppers say they check the sugar content of food labels before they buy a product.74 Overall, this new consumer behavior is a good thing. The wellness industry (for all its flaws) encourages individuals to take a closer look at what they pile into their shopping cart. And that fast-food chains, airports, and vending machines now offer more fruits and vegetables is not something to gloss over.
But there is a spectrum of nutrition, and it deserves a bit more moderation than is currently being touted. Food has become an utterly fraught ordeal for the average woman. A Fear Factor episode that never ends. If you’re to take extreme wellness gurus and fad diets at face value, you cannot consume any sugar, gluten, pesticide residue, dairy, “chemicals,” and more. But these kinds of stark restrictions do more harm than good. We don’t need thirty lollipops. But one won’t kill us. Have that cake on your birthday.
Where we do need to focus more is on the big picture of whether we’re meeting our overall nutritional needs. The thing is, we basically already know what to eat. We’re aware we should lay off too much processed food and increase our vegetable intake. All these specialty diets and strict rules are essentially debating the minuscule percentage of what could be a wee bit better in our diet, but they’re overblown. Often they’re gateways to some hawked product.
All the conflicting, extreme advice has gotten out of hand, which is why experts increasingly weigh in to redirect the conversation. Trailblazers like the registered dietitian Vanessa Rissetto are expanding access to sound, relatable information. As the co-founder of Culina Health and the director of New York University’s Dietetic Internship Program, Rissetto shares budget-friendly recipes and practical tips on her Instagram account, incorporating accessible foods that appeal to underserved communities, including vegetables and boxed macaroni. As she advises, if your culture prizes collard greens or rice with beans, go with collard greens; don’t feel pressured to eat kale. “It’s not so easy if food is where you connect with people and then someone is telling you that the food that you’re eating is ‘not right.’ And oh, by the way, I don’t have the money to make those changes.”
A far cry from the hardcore purity tests of certain wellness influencers, Rissetto doesn’t stress a restrictive orthodoxy. Instead, she advocates doing the best with one’s abilities and resources. Not that it stops online critics from lambasting her over the “gall” to recommend a yogurt cup. “It’s just the way that society views things—we want it to be hard,” says Rissetto. “We want to feel like we worked harder than everybody else.”
We are responsible for what we eat (though certain factors certainly don’t make it easy). But the hypermoralized mandate to eat well induces guilt whenever we’re simply unable to adhere to such regimens.75 Most Americans barely get the time to take a proper lunch break away from their desk, yet somehow they’re held to Alice Waters–level expectations. America is bending toward a healthier future, though it needs a push in the direction of being less confusing and more widely accessible to other groups. You can bend only so far before you break.