In the age of social media and cancel culture, certain healthy food influencers have been subject to public backlash for the opinions they share online. Already a controversial subject that has been the subject of debate for years, is the contrasting public opinion on healthy eating and influencers making it harder to make the right choices for your family?
Canceling healthy eating
I think we can all agree that eating healthy is a valuable goal.
Getting the right balance of nutrients into your body is essential to feeling good, staying physically and mentally fit and promoting long-term health for your family.
There is nothing wrong with focusing on that. Yet lately, some healthy food influencers promoting healthy eating in the form of from-scratch home-cooked meals and the use of unprocessed ingredients have been getting canceled.
The fake lifestyles, unrealistic standards and extreme opinions some of these creators promote have led to people taking issue with the concept as a whole.
How cancel culture is affecting lifestyle influencers
Unless you live under a rock, or avoid social media like the plague, then you will have noticed the large influx of healthy food influencers such as Nara Smith promoting over-the-top versions of healthy eating and from scratch cooking.
Gretchen Adler, an influencer with nearly half a million followers on Instagram, promotes made-from-scratch food and eschews all processed products. Her videos of making Goldfish crackers and Cheez-Its from scratch received backlash for what some commenters see as overly restrictive views on food.
Hannah Neelman (known for Ballerina Farm), a homesteader and social media influencer in Utah, raises her eight children while also participating in beauty pageants. Neelman embodies the idea of the trad wife, a recent cultural phenomenon describing a woman who centers her life on being a mother and homemaker. She, too, advocates for healthy, home-cooked food (we are talking cheese from scratch for adding to homemade pizza) for all her family’s meals and has experienced social media storms.
The backlash focused on these types of influencers is part of the larger cancel culture that has affected dozens of influencers and celebrities in recent years. According to Vice, cancel culture involves boycotting a person or brand, and using social media as a platform for additional commentary about the issue.
Selecting healthy foods for your family has already been a fraught discussion for many years, with so many differing (and strong) opinions on what the best approach is. Combine this with the phenomenon of cancel culture and you see someone being canceled for something objectively good, like eating healthier foods.
How influencer culture pushes for healthy eating
Health influencers have a large and ever-growing audience on social media platforms. Forbes notes that #health on Instagram has over 165 million posts. Many of these conversations can be valuable. They promote change, share ideas and important information and market helpful products and services.
But there are no requirements for being an influencer. Anyone can share information whether they have factual knowledge to back it up. Influencer marketing can further skew the quality of content as companies pay influencers to promote their products.
The reality of healthy eating with busy lives and grocery budgets
In recent years, there has been a pushback against social media for the unrealistic standards it creates. Hannah Messinger at Penn Medicine News talks about how the curated nature of what people post on social media has led to false perceptions of everything from body image to standard of living.
When it comes to healthy eating, many influencer videos and blog posts don’t show what goes on behind the scenes to create homemade meals. Published content is often carefully edited, removing any context for how the influencer lives in reality.
For example, you have a look at my slow cooker ratatouille recipe, you see a couple of pretty pictures, a blog post and a recipe card. What you don't see is the mess covering every available space on the kitchen bench, the two screaming kids in the background, the third baby strapped to my chest because she hasn't stopped crying for the past hour, and me struggling to keep the tears in.
If we look at Ballerina Farm, her husband is a millionaire, and they employ a cleaner. This lifestyle is far from the reality most mothers are living, especially those who have to work outside the home to support their families, limiting the time they have to source specific ingredients and bake meals from scratch.
In her video about making homemade Cheez-Its, Adler reveals that the process takes 18 hours. She also uses einkorn flour, which costs about three times as much as wheat flour. This timeline and cost are not feasible for many families, and some people are fighting back against social media influencers who seem out of touch with reality.
Healthy food influencers may share inflammatory opinions as well, they may not even necessarily believe what they are sharing, but instead are stirring up controversy to garner views and engagement. When it comes to healthy foods, this can come off as attacking parents who do not have time, money or energy to match the lifestyles that these influencers portray.
Striking a balance for healthy eating
Baking your own bread, raising cows for milk and then using that to make your own cheese, refusing any processed foods and other similar practices depicted on social media are more than many families can manage.
In reality, it is possible to eat clean on a budget and make healthy choices with limited time. Small changes to your family’s routine can provide many of the benefits that social media influencers talk about without an entire lifestyle change.
Recipes for soups, salads and casseroles require little prep time and can provide your family with a nourishing, homemade dinner. Chicken wild rice soup is packed with lean protein and replaces white rice with nutrient-dense wild rice. With complete control over the recipe, you can choose ingredients you feel good about.
Other small swaps, like switching traditional produce or meats for organic options or adding whole grains to recipes, let you customize your food to meet your budget and your family’s tastes. As an example, coconut oil popcorn swaps butter for coconut oil with its healthy fats, letting you continue to enjoy your favorite snacks with a healthier spin.
Incorporate more vegetables and fruits into favorite meals as well. Avocado tuna salad or spinach in boxed mac and cheese or even thrown into some Vegetarian Tortellini Soup means you have the convenience of grocery store foods with an added boost of vitamins with minimal extra effort.
Finding your own path to healthy eating
Social media has made healthy eating a performance. While making healthy food choices remains important, the public debate between realistic options and influencer extremes makes those choices harder.
In the end, each family deserves to make decisions about their own health. However, this shouldn’t happen out of context on social media. Choosing how your family eats should take into account time, finances, culture and advice from health professionals.
With all of these different variables, health goals will look different for every family. Social media can be a source of inspiration and community but it is not a definitive guide to raising a healthy family.
This article originally appeared on Food Drink Life.
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