The media has horribly distorted the image of food, and it has altered thousands of people’s sense of what is healthy.
Anthony Warner, also known as the ‘Angry Chef,’ explained in his lecture the overwhelming amount of food pseudo-science that dominates the media. This pseudo-science has become “so entwined in our knowledge that for many people, it is hard to separate.” [1] As the media’s presence becomes more prominent, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distance ourselves from this bombardment of misinformation surrounding diet culture.
These “too-good-to-be-true diets” are a skewed perception of the image of a healthy diet. Online, you often see certain foods titled “miracle foods” or “toxic foods” where they claim that one specific food is responsible for your bad health. This is because It’s easier to grab attention by promoting a simple solution with a snappy headline, misleading statistics, and celebrity endorsements.
The gluten-free diet is a prime example of the media’s successful distortion of a food’s image. Gluten has been targeted and has been unfairly demonized recently. The media’s influence is so strong that many people with no gluten allergies feel compelled to buy pricey gluten-free products in the pursuit of healthiness. As a result, the demand for gluten-free products has increased. Companies are quick to jump on the bandwagon and proudly advertise their products as gluten-free, even if it contains traces of gluten. Astonishingly, just one food has created dramatic changes in diets and supermarket shelves.
The media has transformed the image of food into something that we have to constantly justify and as a source of guilt. However, food is just food, and it doesn’t deserve these extreme labels.
[1] https://angry-chef.com/about
Your post makes some really good points about the way food is represented in the media! I completely agree that it has become unnecessarily extreme – I suppose this is a really effective way to advertise brands to consumers. In this way, it’s almost as if nutritional pseudoscience has just become the perfect clickbait title, and it really makes you wonder if sources providing this information actually want the best for our health or if they just need the clicks.