Graphic by Trinity Kendrick ‘21
By Kate Murray ‘22
Staff Writer
If you grew up in the United States, chances are you have been steeped in diet culture from a very young age.
American children are bombarded with messages from every angle telling them that there is an ideal way to eat and that being thin is both healthy and desirable. The education that children receive about nutrition from parents, schools and the media involves policing food choices, regulating exercise and monitoring weight, often via the inaccurate and misleading body mass index measurement. These practices place moral judgments on what children eat and what their bodies look like. While efforts from adults to teach the youth about nutrition are well-intentioned, they often end up laying the foundation for children to develop unhealthy relationships with food and their bodies. Additionally, the behavior modeled by adults plays a significant role in whether a child develops an eating disorder in their teenage years, a struggle that may last a lifetime.
What many adults fail to realize or remember is that children are natural intuitive eaters, a term coined by registered dieticians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, who understand when they need to eat and when they need to stop. Babies are born with the innate ability to recognize their hunger and fullness, never overeating or undereating when nourishment is in full supply. It’s only when children get older that the adults in their lives begin to disrupt this natural process, labeling certain foods like fruits and vegetables “good” and things like cupcakes and soda “bad” or “special” treats.
Maggie Micklo ’21, member of the student organization Fat Acceptance Now!, highlighted how oftentimes, encouraging kids to eat “healthy” foods sends the message that certain foods have more value than others. “Parents and even schools, also, may be adding morality to foods without realizing it, such as giving sweet foods only as a dessert, as a ‘reward’ for cleaning their plate,” Micklo said. “This makes the sweet ‘dessert’ foods more exciting to a child and devalues the foods already on their plate. This isn’t nutrition — it’s just diet culture.”
Many adults tend to intervene in children’s natural abilities to eat intuitively because they were raised with the same messages about food and body size from the adults in their lives, including nutrition “experts” like medical professionals. Like today’s children, they were taught that being a higher weight is unhealthy and undesirable, and the recipe for thinness is simply regulating diet and exercise. Given a boost by popular culture, these beliefs follow them into adulthood, where they perpetuate these disordered behaviors by monitoring their children’s weight and policing what they eat. Additionally, parents receive shame from other parents, teachers and pediatricians for having higher-weight children, which further fuels the impulse to restrict their child’s diet. Even if adults don’t explicitly use body- or food-shaming language, children are very receptive. If a young girl sees her mother step on a scale every morning or decline a piece of cake, saying, “I shouldn’t eat that,” the child makes the connection that it’s important to monitor one’s weight and restrict certain foods.
While the idea of letting children eat whatever they want may initially seem contrary to everything you’ve been taught about health and nutrition, a growing body of research suggests that diet and exercise are not the key determinants of health. Weight stigma alone is an independent risk factor for poor health outcomes. Weight stigma, or weight-based discrimination, can manifest in a myriad of ways, from being bullied by peers at school to not being able to easily find clothes that fit in retail stores.
A 2017 study found that larger people, including children, who regularly endure weight-based discrimination, are twice as likely to have high cumulative stress on all body systems, which puts them at greater risk for developing Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In other words, the poor health outcomes that are frequently attributed to higher weights may be caused by weight discrimination rather than the weight itself.
Christy Harrison, a registered dietician and anti-diet nutritionist, wrote about the importance of sharing accurate information about health and body size. “If we’re delivering nutrition messages with a side order of weight stigma, we’re actually canceling out any benefit of the nutrition information and putting people’s health at greater risk,” she said.
Additionally, the framework of intuitive eating suggests that when a wide variety of foods are available and free of value judgments, children will be attracted to a diverse array of foods, not just sweets and chips. The key is for adults to send the message that all kinds of foods are in abundance and not contingent upon a child finishing their dinner or behaving well. Without external sources telling them what they should and should not eat at any given time, children can be more mindful of their hunger, fullness and desire for certain foods. Chances are, they are not always going to reach for the less nutrient-dense foods if they know that those foods are available any time they want them.
Adults, especially parents and child care providers, need to take the lead on combating diet culture, starting with what they teach their children about nutrition. First, they should be mindful of what they say about their own bodies and food choices in front of children.
Micklo pointed out that this is especially true for white educators “because the foods deemed most ‘healthy’ are, for the most part, tied closely to a white American diet.” She continued, “Students of color likely are not eating plain chicken breasts, steamed broccoli and whole-grain bread for dinner every night.”
Additionally, adults should make a variety of foods available as often as possible to avoid placing a moral judgment on one type of food over another. “It is essential to give children the opportunity to make food decisions and learn from them without judgment,” Nicole Cruz, another anti-diet registered dietician, wrote on her blog. “Our job as [adults] is to nurture that relationship and reinforce [that] they can TRUST themselves.”
While diet culture isn’t going anywhere any time soon, children deserve to be surrounded by adults who model healthy behaviors surrounding food and nutrition. Child care providers should not underestimate the power of their words and actions, for they control the supply of, and the narrative about, children’s food choices.