Healthy Pariahs

In today's society, science has led to us being able to explain and understand many of the mysteries of the natural world. Included within this is how our human bodies work and how the food we consume is vitally important to the effective functioning of them. I'm going to save the rant on how poor many adult's grasp of basic nutrition appears to be today for another time and focus instead on a societal issue I myself have all too often encountered. The issue in question is the apparent societal stigma around healthy eaters and healthy eating in general.

There seems to be a social pressure to eat foods that are considered non-boring. If I had a pound for every time someone snidely proclaimed about me, aloud, that I treat my body 'as a temple' upon my choosing not to eat an unhealthy food item, or every time I had been called boring for not partaking in the consumption of another unhealthy food item, I would have a lot of pounds. It is this kind of "banter" (for banter see borderline bullying) that is an all too common demonstration of some weird social stigma around healthy eaters/eating. For some reason it seems that the food you choose to eat (just as arbitrarily as the clothes you choose to wear) can indicate to others how cool/fun you are, and just as with the clothes you choose can be a source of ridicule from others. It should be the norm to eat healthily, those that do shouldn't be made to feel like social misfits, because this social stigmatization leads to these otherwise healthy-eating people feeling pressure to conform and eat "fun" unhealthy foods.

I understand that pleasure is gained from the consumption of certain food items, much research has given evidence for the fact that the consumption of highly palatable fats, sugars, and fat-sugar combinations leads to a drug like response in the brain whereby dopamine (the body's reward/pleasure neurotransmitter) is excessively released. The issue I have here is not with people finding unhealthy foods pleasurable to eat (though my argument would always be that food intake shouldn't be purely pleasure focused, it should be primarily health focused), or even that some people do become legitimately addicted to unhealthy foods, the issue is that socially it is nigh-on unacceptable to turn down a slice of cake or a pizza or a beer or to simply choose to eat healthily most of the time.

I have always found it difficult to understand the fact that people appear to need to come up with excuses for the outlandish behaviour of those that are right minded enough to make a conscious choice to give their body the nutrients it requires to function and avoid nutrient-devoid junk. One of the weirdest inferences I commonly encounter in this phenomenon is that eating certain foods is fun while eating others is not and therefore eating certain foods makes you boring. Interesting to note that the more fun foods are often those with a logo, a cartoon mascot and a slogan (just for clarity it has always been grown adults that have delivered these anti-healthy comments to/regarding me and not six year old children). My struggle to understand the reason for being made to feel like a pariah, albeit a healthy one, over the years has lead me to some possible causes.

Perhaps the explanation for the stigma is in the fact that it is not made easy to veer away from toeing the conventional line and just eating whatever chemically infused crap is colourfully packaged up for them, and then near enough shoved down their throats by intrusive advertisements, product placements and billboards. Our capitalist society is structured on the basis that you succeed by making money any way you can, if this means brainwashing consumers into drinking liquids that would be better served de-rusting cars (ahem, coca-cola) or consuming alarmingly unhealthy food products that will contribute to their ultimate early deaths then so be it. Is it this culture that causes those who don't toe the line to be considered reprobates, heretics who offend the sensibilities of those too hypnotized to see what they are actually putting into their bodies?

Maybe the social stigma is present because people genuinely don't have a good enough grasp of basic human nutrition to understand just how bad certain foods and how important other foods are for them. Or perhaps people are aware that eating healthily is the right thing to do and know how to do so, but they just find it too difficult (see dopamine response earlier) and therefore in order to protect themselves they sneer at those who somehow achieve the unachievable and manage to eat healthily, a sort of defence mechanism. Possibly it is simply another example of people lashing out at the different behaviours of others that they find difficult to understand, rather than taking the time to understand other's perspectives and reasons for doing things nowadays it seems to be the norm to jump to ridiculing that difference instead, again probably out of fear/self preservation. Or maybe it is just "harmless banter" and I am an over-sensitive sap.

Whatever the reason for the healthy eating stigma that is certainly present, and prevalent, throughout society today, it is definitely one of the arbitrary social rules that I struggle to get my head around. It is also certainly one of the most unhealthy for our society. The importance of good nutrition cannot be overstated for leading a healthy, fun and long-lasting life, therefore the institutionalised stigmatising of eating healthily, no matter how banter-filled, is a genuinely dangerous one.