Happy November 1st everyone! I welcomed the start of the new month by drinking a large cup of coffee and eating a delicious glory bowl with some friends. I figured that starting these two weeks of monitoring the web for diet news and trends, it would be beneficial for me to eat healthy and pay attention to the health of my own diet.

The only news article from CBC for today was on the new developments about processed meats and the dangers of it. It talks about the new developments from the World Health Organizations show evidence that the consumption of eating processed meats can cause cancer in humans; it does not show levels of risk. Therefore there is no guidance of how much is safe or at what level of consumption does risk factors come into play. It also explains how processed meats also has other health effects, not just cancer, so the danger of eating it has more than one reason.

The news article from New York Times was covering how our culture does not eat or value real bread anymore. There is a trend to go gluten-free and we do not include whole-grain, healthy bread anymore. The value of bread has also gone down because we as a culture switched to an industrial production method, which lowered the nutritional content of bread and created white flour, so we do not know what we are missing when it comes to healthy bread.

This idea of clean-eating and how it can benefit our culture is reflected in the posts on social media. The top 2 most popular posts on Instagram for #diet were:

Each of these photos have the hashtag diet, but also every single one has the hashtag #eatclean or #cleaneating.

The top 2 most popular posts on Tumblr were   which not have any clean-eating hashtags.

As our world becomes increasingly connected to the media, and we engage with it on an ever-increasing frequency, there is a world of information to learn about the links between media and social media. What we are exposed to shapes our view of who we are, and that includes our diet and our body image. In an article by D.M. Boyd and Elad Yom-Tov, it explores the links between coverage of anorexia and increased eating disorders. Although this is focused on anorexia, it does give some insight on other diet issues that the media brings up. The article mentions how the more than someone views content of anorexia, the more likely they are to experience body dissatisfaction (Yom-Tov, E. & Boyd, D.M., 2014). This can correlate to issues of eating clean, if someone is more likely to change their diet after viewing these images, these images have a much more powerful effect than previously thought.

It appears that thus far, there is a link between what news sites are writing about and what people are posting online. There is a high focus of pictures of bodies on Instagram and Tumblr, and this could contribute to body dissatisfaction as the article suggests. It is likely that this will be explored more in the coming two weeks.

Enjoy the last few minutes of fall…

Alyssa.

Sources

• Yom‐Tov, E., & Boyd, D. M. (2014). On the link between media coverage of anorexia and pro‐anorexic practices on the web.International Journal of Eating Disorders, 47(2), 196-202. doi:10.1002/eat.22195