unraveling diet culture: a case for reforming nutrition education in our schools

In the months leading up to my first semester at Grinnell College, I was simultaneously nervous and excited about the change of environment, among other things. I was constantly on the lookout for online content about dorm life, advice for first year students, and information about Grinnell’s academic programs. While I found a surplus of material to satiate my appetite for the college experience, I also found a plethora of content about the “Freshman 15” and ways to avoid it, along with lots of general weight loss advice. Some of it was genuine, positive advice: drink water, move your body for mood-boosting endorphins, eat your greens. However, there was an overwhelming amount that promoted restrictive dieting, demonized certain food groups, and used eating as a way to achieve thinness rather than longevity and lasting health (not to mention most of this advice had no scientific backing but used aesthetically pleasing pictures to draw in an audience and promote unfounded practices). As the information was presented, there was a strong sense of morality associated with what you ate and how you looked, and the image of the fit, strong, primarily white young woman dominated the narrative. 

Looking back, I can see that my conditioned thought patterns contributed to upholding said narrative. I saw weight gain as an indication of a loss of control, believing that coming home for Fall Break with a couple extra pounds reflected negatively on my character. I was doing daily workouts with my track team and eating as healthily as I could, but I constantly had a lingering fear of weight gain or loss of muscle tone. I used Instagram as a way to keep myself “accountable,” scrolling through my feed for reminders to stay healthy, at least by the definition of accounts I was following. Now, that’s not to say that all of the information I was consuming was bad, but the constant noise of diet culture prevented me from seeking out the truth and taking the time to learn for myself what certain foods did for my body, how these foods were being produced and how they were reaching my plate, and how having one idealized body type as the picture of health creates access barriers for so many. 

To backtrack a bit, I look to my elementary, middle school, and high school years, along with my time as a gymnast to fill in the gaps in my health education. I remember everyone in my eighth grade class looking forward to the cooking unit in Family and Consumer Science class, the mixed tales of horror and awe over heart rate monitors and conditioning-based workouts in my freshman and sophomore gym classes, and spending a few weeks tracking my meals, learning about vitamins, and watching Supersize Me in my ninth grade health class. I remember a registered dietitian visiting during gymnastics practice and giving us ideas for meals to fuel a great workout. These experiences were created with the best of intentions, but the gaps between them left room for misinformation to sneak in and create confusion. And, to muddle the conversation even further, we went from learning about vitamins in health class directly to the school cafeteria, a place that offered some nutritious options, but had a menu primarily featuring foods that lacked vital nutrients for growing teenagers. Foods are not inherently “good” or “bad,” and it’s ultimately up to the consumer to eat what works for them, but in combination, a lack of nutrition education and an overwhelming selection of nutrient-poor foods contributes to health habits and diseases that must eventually be treated, usually through drugs. What if we could alleviate this issue of chronic disease and shift the health narrative by changing the conversation around food in schools? What if we normalized using food and movement as tools to help not only the individual, but our communities as a whole? There are so many underlying unjust systems that cause harm, unwellness, and illness -- could adding school gardens, giving food away to students/teachers/community members, designing meal prep and basic nutrition classes so students could bring a healthy meal home to their working family members be a way to mitigate some of these? Obviously, there is additional lifelong work to be done to fully dismantle such systems, but food is something that connects us all. Internalizing the care involved in producing a meal from seed to fork and sharing it with those around us -- can’t we use this as a tool for connection, compassion, and understanding and allow it to spread throughout our communities?

There are many schools that have adapted this model. I’ve been looking at Western Growers Foundation’s Collective School Garden Network website for studies on the benefits of school gardens, and the results are overwhelmingly positive. School gardens teach healthy lifestyles, social and community development, environmental stewardship, and support learning. They represent an opportunity to reclaim our health rather than leaving it in the hands of the Sysco delivery truck, the Instagram influencer selling weight loss in the form of detox tea, or the pharmaceutical industry, which continually profits from our ever growing stream of diet-driven chronic illness.

I will leave you with this message: health does not have a look, no matter how many diet and fitness companies push the prototypical shredded, lithe, and overwhelmingly white body. Diet culture has taken away our efficacy, made us slaves to numerical representations of health (calories, pounds on a scale, BMI, etc.), and continues to create health inequities. What if we changed the focus to shifting the culture, not changing out bodies to fit the culture? Knowledge about our food -- where it comes from, how it can help our bodies, and then producing it together -- is the ultimate tool against the noise. The best person who knows your body is you; food and exercise can be used to honor the most uniting parts of ourselves, not to meet someone else’s idea of “healthy and fit.” As Reiki master Kelsey J. Patel so eloquently stated, we’re all mirrors to each other. If you are willing to do acts of kindness for yourself every day, you can go out in the world and actually lend a hand to someone. Let’s use eating and movement to perpetuate such kindness and let it spread. 

Thank you for reading. If you have a similar experience or would like to continue this conversation, I invite you to send me an email at mccabema@grinnell.edu.