Are you suspicious and mistrustful of the food industry?
Let’s talk about it. The food industry playbook is borrowed from Big Tobacco.
It’s so predictable. Let me explain.
Their goal is to exonerate themselves from public health concerns to continue making billions without any corporate responsibility. Their tactics include:
- Focusing on personal responsibility as the cause of poor health behaviors. In other words, it’s on you.
- Raising fears that government action usurps personal freedom. Once the government starts caring about public health, who knows what they’ll do next?
- Vilifying critics and accusing them of trying to strip people of their civil liberties. In other words, someone who cares about public health is now the food police.
- Criticizing studies that hurt the industry as junk science. For every study showing that added sugars or artificial sweeteners are unsafe, they fund two studies to show they’re safe.
- They plant doubts whenever there are concerns about the industry. They have enormous budgets for PR, and they attack and discredit any naysayers.
Their main goal is to promote the narrative that “nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine here, everything’s safe, back to business.” And this may be true for many people. Many people don’t have a lot to worry about. For example, people that don’t have physical or mental health challenges.
But when the people that don’t have much to worry about start telling people that do have something to worry about that their concerns about food are “diet culture,” that’s called gaslighting.
The food industry loves people who promote their bottom line; many online influencers can do that for them. It’s hard to know who works for the food industry and who doesn’t.
Even though I’m a food-positive body-positive all-inclusive eater, I refuse to promote the bottom line of multinational billion-dollar food corporations with a long history of putting private profits ahead of public health.
I’m bold enough to stand because I’m not for sale. Please stand with me, eat with me, laugh with me, and let’s celebrate the precious gifts of life together.
The food industry playbook will not win in the long-term. The truth always prevails, eventually.
David Wiss
David became a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) in 2013 and founded Nutrition in Recovery, a group practice of RDNs specializing in treating eating and substance use disorders. In 2017, David received the “Excellence in Practice” award at the National Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo. The California Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics awarded him the “Emerging Dietetic Leader Award” in 2020. He earned his Ph.D. from UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health in the Community Health Sciences department (with a minor in Health Psychology) by investigating the links between adverse childhood experiences and various mental health outcomes among socially disadvantaged men. His treatment philosophy is based on a biopsychosocial model which incorporates an understanding of biological mechanisms, psychological underpinnings, and contextual factors that integrate the social determinants of health. Wise Mind Nutrition's website offers a fully online interactive treatment program in Spring 2023.