How Big Food Tries to Co-Opt the Anti-Diet Movement

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Over the past year, we've brought you a couple of different perspectives on body size and shape. In last year's episode with Professor Harriet Brown, we talked about the profound impact of diet culture on mental health. Then we did an episode about the new GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic, Wigovi, and Monjaro, and the ways that they're changing our conversation about body size and shape too. If you haven't noticed, the through line here is that the interplay between body weight and health is really, really complex. On the one hand, there's pretty strong scientific evidence relating high adiposity, or proportion of body fat, to early mortality over the whole population.

On the other, though, that optimal level for you or me, or any given individual, is way less clear. Even at the population level, it's not the quote smaller the better, as some would have. you think. The risk of mortality is actually highest among the skinniest people. Don't forget that, despite our society's relative plenty, for the vast majority of history and in many places in the world today, starvation kills more than obesity.

Then there's the fact that it's hard to measure the quote right. size, and using measures like body mass index introduce a bunch of problematic assumptions about the body density and shape that tend to marginalize communities of color, who were excluded from these models when they were developed. And that doesn't even start to scratch the surface on the way that our society perceives and stigmatizes people based on their body size. The risk of eating disorders continues to increase over time, in large part because of the frankly dangerous conversation we tend to have, equating body size and shape with everything from moral goodness to discipline to how attractive you are. And then there's the fact that there's a difference between having a certain body size and shape and changing it.

Couple all the judgments we heap upon people of a certain size and shape and the fact that changing it is hard, and you get all kinds of charlatans and snake oil salesmen trying to sell you the way to quote shed the pounds or look great in a bathing suit. Anyone who's ever tried to lose weight can tell you that it's stupefying. The science alone about what types of foods, when to eat them, and in what quantities, it can be tough to fully grasp. And when you add on the thicket of fad diets built on shaky ground, well, you've got a stress-inducing mess. Trying and failing on any one diet can reinforce the shame heaped on people over their body size and shape, leading people to internalize even further.

When you're told the shape of your body is a measure of your self-control, and then the diet you're told can't fail, fails, you can imagine the self-talk that can result. And that has real harm, inducing anxiety, depression, and a relationship with food that can cause eating disorders. And that harm has led folks to question the concept of a diet in the first place. A whole crop of influencers have taken that message to social media. On TikTok, and then, two weeks later, on Instagram reels.

for us millennials, influencers are encouraging folks to ditch the diet for a more intuitive approach to eating. I've got to tell you, I agree with a lot of that messaging. Too often we think of body size and shape as a destination, and eating as simply a means to an end. But food is about a lot more than our body size and shape. It's a source of nourishment, cultural awareness, and celebration, and joy.

And learning to build a healthy relationship with it, and with yourself, and your own. body shape, can both help you get to your ideal body size and shape, sustainably, and without the shame and guilt of yo-yo diets. But more than that, I believe that so much of the diet culture out there is motivated less by using science, and more by the opportunity to prey upon the anxieties of vulnerable people to make a buck. Worse, so much of the situation individuals face is a function of a food system that's been manufactured by corporations that sell us food. They lobby government to subsidize them, making that food artificially cheap and available in ways that maximize their bottom lines.

And that's just it. The fight over our waistlines is too much about corporate bottom lines, rather than our well-being. And now it's taken a different turn. It turns out that the food corporations who've been lobbying our government officials all these years wanted to make sure to lobby us, too. And they realize that they might have a natural ally in the anti-diet influencers I just mentioned.

Take a listen to this.

All right. Can you introduce yourself for the day?

And so can you give us a sense of how this ecosystem works?

How does an influencer make their money?

Now even it's common for people to target what are called, like, micro-influencers. So these are people typically around 10,000 to 50,000 followers on these platforms. And they are seen as maybe more relatable. They're less like a big social media celebrity. And they're targeted for that reason as well.

In general, people are following these folks because they sort of have these either parasocial relationship with them. You know, they follow their content. They watch how they live their lives. They trust them more inherently. And that's really powerful for an advertiser.

So be it a food company or a beauty brand, or skincare, like, this is just a perfect target for their advertising messaging.

Or is it often sort of just like, hey, I'm going to account for hire and I'm going to say whatever else, whatever it is that you all want me to say?

But yeah, it really ranges the gamut. If it's an expert, like in our story, dieticians are credentialed health professionals. They are targeted because of their expertise. And these folks know that, right? The companies, the food companies, any supplement company, beverage company, they'll see that they're dieticians, they're trusted by their followers for providing them, you know, advice about nutrition and health and well-being in general.

And that is a perfect target for them.

And, you know, maybe it's just the algorithm reading me, but even my wife, who has very different interests to me, she's like, who's V-Shred? And I'm like, I'm sorry, that's your algorithm. I think we share an IP address half the time. So you're just going to have to deal with V-Shred guy just like I do. But you get fed all kinds of content and, you know, a lot of it is selling you explicitly some diet, some new fat, some new way to, you know, lose weight, look great, you know, be ready for the beach, whatever it is that they hook you on.

But there has been a pushback to that and a really organic pushback to say, you know, maybe all this dieting and all of the anxiety that comes with it isn't great. Can you tell us a little bit about the anti-diet influencer community and sort of what their message has been and what's driven that?

What we found in our investigation is that the food industry is now capitalizing on that anti-diet message in order to sell products and advance their agenda. So we found through a data analysis that food companies are disproportionately sponsoring anti-diet influencers to disseminate their messages on social media. That we also looked more closely at one company, General Bills, which has taken it way further than any other company. What General Bills did is they sponsored a study into food shaming, which is a major concern for the anti-diet movement, which they said, found that people who reported being food shamed were more likely to have mental health problems, to experience isolation, and also more likely to avoid the cereal aisle in grocery stores. And then they used the findings of this study to push back against a proposed federal regulation that would add front of package health warnings to food products.

So they essentially said that putting a notice on the front of the box saying that a food is high in fat or high in sugar or some other unhealthy product would be food shaming consumers, and therefore they were trying to stop it from happening.

Right. And we had a great episode last year with Professor Harriet Brown, who's written quite a bit about some of the negative consequences of diet culture and has really done some pioneering work talking about this. And the issue here isn't that the that there isn't a negative consequence to perpetual dieting, both for mental health and for physical health. The issue here is about who's funding it. Right.

And to your point, when General Mills that makes money selling you foods that may have negative consequences for a whole number of health outcomes, now sponsors research and then uses that research both in trying to change federal policy, but then also, you know, potentially going out and buying access to certain influencers and buying their microphone and their camera, that becomes a challenge. Caitlin, I want to ask you, you know, how widespread is the anti-diet influencer community? How much engagement are they getting relative to, you know, V-Shred and some of these other diet fads? And then, when did you first start to see that there might have been some less than organic influence on the nature of the messaging?

You know, we set a pretty clear threshold of around 10,000 followers, but some of these folks have like millions of followers on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The kind of universe that we were looking at, it was about 40 percent of that kind of big dietician influencer category that were kind of regularly using anti-diet messaging. And that group alone had nine million followers. So it's like it's a sizable audience. And this messaging is also kind of just pervasive, not just online, but also like amongst diet dieticians.

And so, you know, we saw this as something that we wanted to explore a bit more. I don't think we went into this expecting necessarily that we would see any kind of coordinated campaigns. necessarily. We wanted to just sort of see if the anti-diet influencers, that kind of subset, that 40 percent were being sponsored in their posts. And we found that a majority of them were partnering with food, beverage, supplement companies.

This isn't necessarily evidence of a coordinated campaign. This just suggests that the food industry in general is seeing these folks as particularly good at selling their products, be it that they're dieticians, they're anti-dieticians, regularly talking about how junk food should not be labeled as junk food and foods shouldn't be labeled as healthier and unhealthy. Like the messaging lines up kind of perfectly in this case. For General Mills case, you know, we saw that there was a really clear example, as Hasha was talking about, of them not only speaking to dietitians at a conference, but also sponsoring specific posts, working directly with dietitians. And so these types of posts were labeled with things like paid partnership, hashtag, sponsored, hashtag, ad, the things you would expect, for, you know, a regular paid partnership on a platform like TikTok or Instagram.

And then you look a little closer and you see things like hashtag derail the shame. And so one of the campaigns we sort of address in the story is this campaign specifically pushing the ready to eat cereals from General Mills, where it's the sort of same messaging being used across this group of dietitians, all kind of talking about how we need to end the cycle of food, shaming, how these cereals are really great and just parroting that language from General Mills.

And, as a result of taking this advice, she gained 50 pounds in a period of two months and eventually gained enough weight that she started to seriously worry about her health. And she spoke to us after having left the anti diet movement because she was concerned that other people who encountered this kind of content on social media might go down the same path. And she wanted to share her story as kind of a cautionary note for people who were in the same place.

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You know, we haven't gotten, as a society, the conversation about food and health right at all. And I think, you know, in so much of that is because the focus has not been on what is actually healthy for people. It's been on some of the external goals of looking a particular way. And, you know, as in so many of the challenges that we face when it comes to health, like, the issue is, you know, rampant, unchecked capitalism. One group is trying to sell you a whole bunch of food.

The other group is trying to sell you some supplement or diet fad that they say is going to help you. And meanwhile, right, you know, we, the nature of thermodynamics haven't really changed. And our genetics were sort of set in a time where our food environments were particularly scarce when it came to certain kinds of food. And we now live in a very different kind of environment. And the challenge is that, you know, we struggle with this problem of ubiquity, where, you know, we we're not very good at addressing the things that change around us, especially if they change slowly.

And so everyone looks for answers in do I diet, do I not diet? Right. Do I eat X or do I not eat X? Rather than asking what is the set of structures, right, the subsidies that are at play when it comes to the price of corn or the price of soybeans, or the price of oil that changes what a certain producer can make? What are the policies at play that tell me, or don't tell me, what I am supposed to know about what I'm eating?

And unfortunately, right, and like? unless you've really spent some time thinking about who's behind the message, right, it feels like these are all organic. And the issue here really is that we want people to be empowered to make their best decision based on an unadulterated set of messages, right, that are based in science, rather than the incentives of some company or another, right, to tell you that you need to do X to lose weight or you need to eat X to to to save your mental health. And this is that story. And the reason I really wanted to feature it here is because it's a story about how corporations and their interests end up misinforming a public and creating circumstances where people, A, don't have information about what the science says to keep them at their best and optimal shape and health, most importantly, but also about the ways that corporations consistently corrupt to sell you things.

Right. Because that's that's the goal here. General Mills wants to sell boxes of cereal. They really don't care about what the diet, what the science says about dieting. They want to sell you cereal and they worry that public policy could be really effective in getting people to choose other items rather than cereal, which is unfortunately, you know, when it comes to caloric density by macronutrient, really calorically dense and not very dense in the micronutrients that we need to truly nourish ourselves.

I want to. I want to sort of step back here, right, because. The amount of money, right now that we have this sort of infrastructure that is less regulated than traditional media infrastructure, the amount of money that these companies will invest to launder their message, I worry, is only going to grow. Do we have a sense of how much they're spending on this kind of marketing and whether or not it's impacting public policy?

I think generally, we also know that the money being spent on influencers from a company's perspective goes a lot further than maybe traditional advertising dollars, like buying a TV ad or buying a radio ad, what have you. It's just so much more value for what they're getting. There's a person who followers are trusting, right, telling you a message that's even more compelling. It's a real person you form some sort of social media, at least, relationship with. And it just goes that much further with influencers.

And after these stories came out that showed that these dieticians had made posts on behalf of this industry group without making it fully clear to viewers that they were being paid by the soda industry, the FTC stepped in. It sent warning letters to the American Beverage Association and a number of the influencers involved in the campaign. And it also, this was, we thought, really significant. They clarified their standard. And that standard was not just that an influencer has to say hashtag, ad or hashtag sponsored, but they have to be clear about who is paying for the message.

So even if a viewer knows that it's an ad, that's not enough. They have to know if it's sponsored by an industry that has a direct stake in that message, because that affects viewers' ability to assess the credibility of that message. And so, after the FTC sent out these warning letters and stated explicitly that people had to be clear about who was paying them, we saw that a number of the dieticians who had engaged in those campaigns started disclosing more clearly. They started naming who their sponsors were. They started saying in the video of their social media posts, and not just in the caption, who was sponsoring them.

So we did see indications of better disclosure after the previous story we did.

Dieticians are, you know, licensed health professionals like any other. And there is a code of ethics around what they can and can't do. And in speaking to dieticians, they sort of told us that many people get tons and tons of requests from brands and companies, but they sort of choose to work with brands. that kind of aligns with their values. as they describe.

That part, I think, you know, defining exactly what dieticians can and can't do, or any health professional really on the platforms, is not exactly regulated. Right. The FTC is not specifically calling out medical professionals, health professionals, on these platforms. But they are saying, you know, if you are someone working with a company, you need to make it immediately clear to the consumer viewing that content.

there's not really a precedent for like shutting down a channel. But the others are the boards that that oversee some of these folks. I was, I was surprised to find from your reporting that one of the influencers that had received one of these letters was somebody that I follow, Dr. Ids. And, you know, he does these sort of scientific breakdowns of of, of recommendations for eating.

But I, you know, it's interesting, right, because I didn't know that he was. he was, I hate to say it, but like on the take.

And and it was surprising to me considering his content, but it was good to understand. Has there been any movement from medical boards or dietetics boards to hold some of these influencers accountable for either taking the kind of industry support that they're taking or, or at least not, disclosing it?

Overall, the response from the Academy was also really to push back on our reporting, to try to downplay, I would say, the idea that this was a serious problem within their profession. So there are mechanisms within the Academy to push back on this. But it seems like the leadership of the Academy has taken the view that, you know, dietitians are being unfairly targeted here rather than wanting to take proactive steps against anyone who may have violated ethical codes.

you know, maybe more visible, higher contrast, something that is even an option, I guess, that wasn't always there. So little things that are ways in which the platform can signify to a viewer that this might be an ad. But no, I don't think we've seen any kind of, you know, strong push from a platform like TikTok, Meta, to clamp down on influencers, in part because, as you said, I think influencers, particularly the biggest ones, are the kind of heart and soul of those platforms.

And more content made. And that's what benefits them. And then, of course, for the companies, right, their goal is just to sell, sell, sell. And if this advertising is going to work and it's going to yield boxes sold, then so be it. And what suffers is certainly the audience out there, who is struggling to make heads or tails about how best to promote their goals for health.

And then, you know, our general ecosystem of knowledge. And one of the big challenges of the social media era, which this highlights perfectly, is that we've gone from being a place where there was some semblance of truth to a place where now it's all takes. And the hard part about take based communication is that you don't know who's behind what take. And the hard part about this is that they're manipulating a relationship that an influencer has generated with their audience, right, because of a certain level of trust, specifically to drive a take, to sell a product. And we see it on across the board.

This is the, unfortunately, the goal of pharma. And, you know, when you think about all of the seeming capital crimes and I mean, you know, capitalism crimes that we, the General Mills, is accused of here, whether it's buying people's voices or it's lobbying. Right. Nobody's done that more than pharma has. And it's to the same goal.

We want to sell a medicine and we're going to make sure that we are manipulating the public conversation. The difference, though, is that they're operating usually in a much more regulated ecosystem. And, because of the dangers of of this, there's been a lot more effort, a lot more effort to to try and regulate this. And I do hope that your reporting leads to a certain wake up call regarding the dangers of just the lack of regulation here and the risks when it comes to, you know, real people living real lives, trying to understand how best to, you know, to to improve their own health. I want to ask you, you know, where do we go from here as you guys think about where the story is evolving?

Where do you feel like the the important next steps will come in?

The movement itself, one of its central arguments is that diet culture has been corrupted by the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and other special interests, that everyone who is telling you you need to lose weight somehow has a vested interest in that. So I hope that part of the solution will be a conversation within the anti-diet movement about what the food industry is trying to do with their efforts and what they really stand for. You know, is it about fighting weight discrimination? Is it about fighting toxic body images, or is it about selling sugary cereals?

And that's just not what's happening on social media. And so I think people just should really naturally be super skeptical of the type of content they're seeing on here. And I hope our reporting helps to shine a light on that.

I really appreciate you all taking the time to join us today. Thank you so much.

And for four months of that time, we had no idea it was happening. Meanwhile, the USDA continues to face heat from public health scientists over its slow response and the lack of transparency in sharing its data with the research community. I can tell you that, whatever comes of this, you want to start on the right foot. And speed, transparency and accurate communication are the hallmark here. This doesn't bode well.

And last week, I told you about the FDA's testing of milk supplies. This week, the FDA followed up its testing with egg inoculation tests, a fancy way of saying that they tried to use samples to grow the virus in eggs. The tests showed that they were unable to do so, further reinforcing the notion that pasteurization kills live virus. They also tested other dairy products, including formula, sour cream and cottage cheese, finding no evidence of live virus there either. Moving on, this earthquake of news happened last week.

A historic shift, one of the most significant changes in U.

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But it's a step in the right direction. Right now, cannabis is classified as Schedule 1, right up there with cocaine and heroin. But there are some obvious differences here. Schedule 1 implies that there is, quote, no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. You can't die directly of a marijuana overdose, unlike other Schedule 1 drugs.

And we've known for a while that it may have some really important clinical uses for analgesia or pain relief and in treating seizures. The problem, though, is we can't know for sure because of how many restrictions there have been on studying it, specifically because it's a Schedule 1 substance. Rescheduling it to Schedule 3, akin to ketamine or anabolic steroids, that'll open the door for far more federally funded research to better understand its clinical uses. And finally, because it's a Schedule 1 substance. right now, businesses dealing in cannabis are closed off to certain aspects of the banking sector that themselves come with important security protections.

And so rescheduling it will allow companies access to these tools, creating pressure to root out some of the, well, we'll call them less savory actors in the space. But there are worries here. One of the big dangers of legalized cannabis is the ability of a few major players in the space to fully consolidate the market. When that happens, and there are a few huge players, their ability to lobby our poorest political system increases. And with that, the ability they have to set their own rules of the road.

And I worry about what that means when it comes to important regulations protecting children from being marketed to. We'll be watching the space. And for more on this, I hope you'll check out a previous episode called Cannabis Capitalism, where I sat down with Professor David Jernigan, an expert in marijuana regulation. Finally, last week, the Biden administration reinstituted protections for LGBTQ plus folks seeking health care. The rule stems from a key piece of the Affordable Care Act banning discrimination in health care.

more generally. It had been interpreted by the Obama administration to include a ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in 2016.. But it was reinterpreted by the Trump administration to include the narrowest definition of, quote, sex to include simply biological sex at birth. The new interpretation basically reinstates the Obama era interpretation. But all of this, well, it highlights just how tenuous this is.

a critical, fundamental civil rights protection left to be flung back and forth between different administrations, leaving folks in limbo and subject to the whims of the party in power. How to fix it? Congressional action, which, of course, has been a challenge for that body. That's it for today. Thank you so much to Sasha and Caitlin for joining us.

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