The meaning of food
Food is undeniably much more than mere nutrition, it’s a social vehicle that allows us to distinguish ourselves by lifestyle and to establish social connections. We eat to celebrate, to pay respect to the deceased, to reduce stress, to enhance our well-being, to please our God, etc. Food has endless moral significance along with numerous religious meanings (Rozin, 2005). The social habit of eating is deeply embedded (Higgs & Ruddock, 2020). Indeed, eating alone is commonly perceived as embarrassment and leading to pitying looks in most cultures.
On the personal level, food is also a central part of identity, incorporated into our self-definition (Fischler, 1988) that carries a lot of symbolic personal meaning. Adding these to the social meanings, results in eating being one of the most vicious fields of debate. People commonly hold strong opinions on what should be eaten, in what amount, and in what order. Some also pick their friends based on matching eating habits and are prejudiced against different food choices (Steim & Nemeroff, 1995).
Unsurprisingly, eating has extreme amount of stigma around it, and amongst the most stigmatized groups in Western cultures are the overeaters and the undereaters. Their public perceptions are worse than those with mental illness (Roehrig & McLean, 2010). Stigmas are known to derive from the general pressure of conformity and the consequent fear of differing from the expectation, projected to someone else. They commonly relate to some moral, symbolic associations (Rasmussen, 2012), as we’ll discuss below, both overeating and undereating are associated with several, otherwise unrelated, moral traits.
Stigmatized as weak: Overeating
Overweight individuals are often portrayed in mass media as lazy, weak-willed, and self-indulgent (Puhl & Heuer, 2009), fuelling moral assumptions about an overweight person. This stigma is particularly detrimental as it makes people withdraw themselves from social events in fear of ridicule which brings additional issues, such as isolation and spiralling health problems (Tomiyama, 2014). The overweight stigma often taints leisure and hobby sport events as well, where attendees reported being openly scored down for their body fat, despite their positive contribution.
Overeating has been attributed to a number of factors, including external and internal causes (Hill, 1998), the most impactful ones being discussed below.
Food variety and quality
In the contemporary developed world, there is a surplus of food that is easily accessible and comes in an enormous variety, which itself promotes eating. In addition, food technology has developed “super” foods, such as chocolate, cakes, cookies, and other palatable foods that are much more appealing, and more calorically dense than almost any food in nature (Rozin, 2005).
Psychological factors
A commonly discussed psychological factor of food consumption is the inaccurate bar for what is considered average weight. Misestimating what the average weight is is common in the case of children and adolescents whose social networks (parents and schoolmates) include a lot of overweight individuals. As a result, these kids are more likely to underestimate their own weight and develop an inaccurate picture of what is average for their age. This picture is further reinforced by their peer group as they tend to affiliate with other overweight peers due to the often experienced social exclusion (Salvy et al., 2012).
Emotional factors
The emotional factors of eating are well researched. The latest findings suggest that as a reaction to light and moderate stress, most of us eat an average of 30-50% more. While when the stress reaches a severe or traumatic level, our appetites decline and we eat less (Blair et al., 1991).
There are also neurobiological components linked to overeating, suggesting that just like drugs, palatable food can activate the brain’s reward system (Blumenthal & Gold, 2010). Emotional eating bears the risk of spiralling into an overeating lifestyle via producing powerful behavioural reinforcement for eating. Repeated stimulation of the reward pathways through highly palatable food may lead to neurobiological adaptations that eventually increase the compulsive nature of overeating (Adam & Epel, 2007).
Biological factors
A well-known biological factor that impacts consumption habits is someone’s tendency to deposit fat, and other inheritable genetic predispositions (Loos & Yeo, 2022). However, a lesser known metabolic process that impacts how we process the food we eat is that fat-rich foods fail to signal the brain about fullness, leading to a form of unintentional overeating. This effect is linked to both the high energy density and the strong sensory qualities of fat-rich food (Blundell & MacDiarmid, 1997). Also, ingested fat can stimulate further food intake, which means that a single high-fat snack commonly leads to a significant increase in the amount eaten that day. These effects offer an explanation to the relationship of the eating patterns that provides long-term overeating on a high-fat (low-food quotient) diet (Lissner et al., 1987).
Cultural pressure
Most of us like the idea that what we eat is our choice, but the fact is that palatable foods are actively promoted and are a major part of modern culture. Their ubiquitous nature and the constant media pressure to buy them (Zimmerman & Shimoga, 2014), accompanied by their metabolic specifics detailed above, leads to many people being unable to maintain an energy intake that does not exceed energy expenditure, resulting in an inevitable gain in weight (Blundell & MacDiarmid, 1997). The dominant narrative on overeating, which is explained exclusively via personal moral and lifestyle factors, ignores all other critical components that lead to overeating.
The cultural paradox is that, as existing research overwhelmingly demonstrates, obesity stigma results in weight gain via the added life stress (Tomiyama, 2014).
The prejudice is ever-present in every community; there is not a colleague without a ‘helpful’ dietary advice, there is not a stranger without judgment in their eyes or a ‘fat joke’ on their tongue. Today, life with extra body fat is emotionally crippling. The increased media exposure, and catastrophizing terms like ‘obesity epidemic’ and ‘public health crisis’, that were originally propagated to encourage people to lose weight (Callahan, 2013), have dramatically backfired. The social exclusion, ‘fat shaming’, personal devaluation, etc. just like any other form of abuse, resulted in depressed people with less eating control, (Seacat & Mickelson, 2009), and consequently, unhealthier diets and further weight gain (Puhl & Brownell, 2006).
Stigmatized as vain: Undereating
The other target of social prejudice around eating are those who undereat. The public often trivializes their issue as just trying to look like a celebrity, belittling the challenges associated with their condition (Dimitropoulos et al, 2016). In some cases, even the first line of help, the mental health worker, labels them as ‘just too sensitive to fashion’. Even though undereating can indeed be linked to the distorted body image promoted in the media (Puhl & Suh, 2015) via the fear of social exclusion for being fat, leading to the overcontrol of weight, that is just one component.
When the overcontrol of weight meets unstable family bonds and life uncertainty (Kenny & Hart, 1992), clinical levels of undereating can form. The impact of the nurturing environment (e.g., disconnectedness and criticism) in the formation of severe undereating is well documented in academic literature, showing that the causes of undereating run much deeper than body dissatisfaction. Despite the desire to be unhealthily thin being borrowed from socially constructed body image. Behind that, eating disorders likely represent a way of coping with identity issues and gaining control over one’s life (Polivy & Herman, 2002).
Undereating disorders come with severe biological consequences as the body is denied the essential nutrients it needs to operate properly. These disorders are extremely dangerous to physical health with the leading category being anorexia nervosa, which has the highest mortality rate of any distress classified as psychiatric disorder (Arcelus et al, 2011). Severe effects and notable mortality rates are also present in bulimia (characterised by normal-looking body weight but ill metabolism due to the cycles of binge eating and purging – vomiting, laxatives) and binge eating disorders (binge eating without purge cycles).
Amongst the general population, temporary decline of appetite and loss of weight can occur as a response to more severe or chronic stress while not necessarily reaching clinical level of underweight. Most of us naturally know that a sudden weight loss likely derives from a crisis in one’s life. The reduced food intake is driven by physiological changes that interfere with digestion by delaying glucose absorption and gastrointestinal transit (Blair et al., 1991). This decreased capacity to digest and the lingering food in the stomach creates a feeling of faux fullness, resulting in loss of appetite.
How the environment shapes what we eat, when we eat and how much we eat
Our food choices are not based merely on nutritional value as they were in the early days of our evolution. In those days, nutritional value and safety were the most important factors, as the natural world of food was filled with toxic plants, animals carrying infections, and edible foods that were nutritionally incomplete. In these times, most of our food choices were based on tasting and learning, the process which held severe risk (Breslin, 2013).
Today, this learning happens via cultural transmission even though, we still preserve genetic guidelines. These guidelines include the reluctance to try new food without seeing others eating it, and some innate taste and textural biases, such as sweet tastes being associated with energy from fruits, and as such, very desired. While bitter tastes are associated with toxins, and fatty textures are associated with good substance (Rozin, 2005). Our food choices today are strongly influenced by both external and internal processes with the two major forces being social norms and social comparison.
The impact of social norms
Social norms are unwritten codes of conduct that provide a guide to appropriate behaviour which we unconsciously adopt (Bandura, 1977). There are norms around eating as well and our diet commonly follows the norms of the peer group we belong to (Ball et al., 2010). Research repeatedly confirmed that we model the eating choices of our dining partners and consume similar amount and type of food to what they eat (Herman et al., 2003). Even though by default, we are motivated to eat as much food as we can, it is our social company that determines when we stop eating.
Research shows that amongst strangers or acquaintances we eat less to avoid the stigmatization of overeating, while amongst friends we eat more to connect with them deeper and for longer. But when our friends eat less, we reduce our intake as well, and it’s enough to just hear about them eating less: we in turn decrease the size of our plate. This often referred to as impression management, as we attempt to control the picture other people form about us (usually linked to social goals e.g. fitting into our peer group; Vartanian et al., 2007). Conveying a good impression through eating at any age appears to involve eating less, because obesity is highly stigmatized in most Western cultures (Salvy et al., 2012).
The impact of social comparation
Social comparison on the other hand is the innate drive of every human to evaluate their own abilities by comparing themselves to others (Festinger, 1954). We do it constantly, in every aspect of life including eating. Depending on our state of mind, we either compare in an upward manner (to someone we think is better than us, e.g. in terms of body shape) which can evoke the feeling of inadequacy and shame. Or we compare downwards (to someone less fortunate in that area) which can lead to temporarily feeling better and eating more, resulting in guilt afterwards. The diet comparison is everywhere. Every time we see someone eating, we compare our plate to theirs (Cavazza, 2011). And just like social norms, social comparison also has the power to overwrite our satiation signals and take over the control on how much we eat.
As seen, there are strong social drives behind people engaging in different diets or striving to achieve certain body shape. We’re all affected by those drives; however, we’re not impacted by them in the same way. The frequency of exposure, the availability of social bonds that can buffer by reinforcing our personal qualities, our thought processes and environmental factors all contribute to the final result. Basically, the adage ‘we are what we eat’ is only true on the metabolic level, as the nutrients we consume serve as the building blocks for our cells (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 2021), while everything else is driven by social codes.
Summary
Food has great meaning in our lifes and is deeply ingrained into our identity and social self-definition. Due to its personal and social symbols, eating is a field of active public debate with an immense amount of stigma attached to it. Eating is a topic that never goes old, while the diet industry around it keeps producing bogus dietary programs, advisories and products. It requires great awareness of the external and internal forces shaping our eating habits to avoid getting lost in the spiral of weight gain and weight loss attempts. Always seek advice from reputable sources to guide your decisions, as what you eat has a fundamental impact on your mental and physical functioning. Because these social pressures strongly influence when, why, and how much we eat, the next part of this article we look into what makes dieting so complex and what is beyond willpower that really makes a diet succeed.
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