health nut pipelines
I watched a video by Madisyn Brown yesterday about how eating healthy, alleged superfoods, organic food etc. has switched from being perceived as leftist and is instead now seen as Republican, right-wing, conservative, trad, whatever - at least in the US. The new association is there because of the boom in carnivore influencers, raw milk proponents and trad wives making everything from scratch with whole, sometimes even self-grown foods, and they’re all often conservatives. So now it seems like caring about nutrition and health more deeply has the risk of becoming more right-leaning in the US through the content associated with it that you’ll be exposed to by algorithms.
It made me think of other “health nut pipelines” or health radicalizations I’ve witnessed, driven by online content.
There was this one woman I used to be friends with who only ever uncritically applied TikTok and Reels health advice. She loved oat milk, but one day read that it was sooooo unhealthy because it’s “just a sugar drink” and she stopped buying it. Oh and the evil seed oils in it! It was always so annoying to correct that and ask her questions about it to make her realize it was bullshit. Like: Who said that? What are the sources? Have you researched it? What about eating a bowl of rolled oats? What about lactose being split into glucose? What about inflammation levels on animal fats? And all that. It was like raising my naive teenage daughter, but we were a similar age (~27)… that friendship didn’t last.
I’ve noticed my own mother becoming more radical about food. We don’t have much contact for a truckload of reasons, but I notice it when we do have it. And it’s all the typical stuff you’d expect someone almost 60 to be like when they use Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. I had a drink with chia seeds in it yesterday, and she implied they weren’t really healthy. Tell me, what’s supposed to be bad about them? She herself used to make me chia pudding as a teen, because back then it was a “superfood” good for the gut or something. With her, you really never know what’s next. Healthy foods are like a trend item that is in or out, and past health foods are now evil. At the same time, she took silica capsules with no idea what it was even supposed to help her with, just because “it’s good” and even continued to take them when it caused her rashes. There’s also the idea of evil “E-codes” on food, even though most E’s in the food we eat here are harmless coloring, spices, and vitamins. She will do a shot with curcumin in it, but balk at E100, which is curcumin. She recently asked me what gut probiotics she’s supposed to take and she’s apparently doing it just because? Why not go to a doctor and get your gut microbiome analyzed and get approved ones that make sense? She’s just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks in the name of health and because of scrolling too much, but will also proudly say she doesn’t disinfect the skin before doing her injections. She’s definitely a case of “wanting to eat better and take care of self, suddenly fully stuck in the health food trend cycle where normal foods are suddenly evil, and exploited by health influencers selling dubious supplements”.
Then, there is my own. Having undiagnosed gut issues definitely increased my likelihood to fall for the whole foods plant based, clean eating type of content and what’s associated with it. By itself, it is okay and I still eat similarly, but I mean the whole kind of online content that is extremely orthorexic - where people say tomatoes are evil and so on. They convince you that you can heal anything by cutting out this and that, never eating entire food groups ever again, and it can really be taken to the extreme especially by people who are suffering and whose issues always get worse after eating. I did take it too far. I think my worst time was in 2020 when I cried at home because I felt like all food was poisoned because I didn’t and couldn’t grow it myself and there were too many things and people touching it in transport to the supermarket and in the supermarket itself. I was underweight at that point and being in the supermarket with all food being unsafe felt extremely shitty. I felt bad buying a mango. That’s not normal or okay.
I think it’s absolutely crazy what’s going on health-wise online and I am glad I am not a part of it anymore and not really exposed to it. The people profiting off of it are ruthless with their claims and prices. There are entire corners of the internet just dedicated to pathologizing everything your body does, keeping you in fear and terror about your environment and intake, and who try to tell you the effects of an undiagnosed illness, a stressful job, loneliness etc etc is actually because you don’t eat enough bananas or haven’t bought their 300$ course on how they cured their Crohn’s disease with raw milk. If I could make all of them explode with my mind, I would. I don’t know how you can sleep at night exploiting sick people.
If you also have stories of health-obsessed relatives, maybe we can commiserate.
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Published 15 Mar, 2025