A teia da magreza e da juventude: os discursos sobre alimentação na revista Veja.

Abstract

The current study had the objective of analyzing the meaning behind the nutritional concepts disseminated in the written media through the Veja magazine during the first decade of the twenty first century. It was a qualitative study of fifty-five articles related to the twenty-three selected magazine covers whose themes were related to diet. Even if within this specific means of communication the nutritional concepts are divulged to literate readers of the middle and upper classes, there is a permeability of the said knowledge to the more popular classes. Despite it not being a field of autonomous production about nutritional knowledge such as that of a scientific doctor, the written media has great relevance for the understanding of contemporary nutrition. With its ambiguity and contradictions, according to Mudry (2009), the language related to diet reconfigures people´s relationships to food. In the researched material, the themes which emerged most frequently were those related to weight loss and longevity. The hegemonic standard of a skinny, young, fit and healthy body, often associated to celebrities, conjures an ideal of beauty, mainly female, in which being thin and young are crucial. Healthism and medicalization emerged, intertwined in the nutritional discourses of the magazine, as did Nutritionism, an ideology identified by Gyorgy Scrinis (2008, 2013). Nutritionism is characterized by a reductionist approach with regards to the body and eating habits, with metric and quantified discourses that aim at finding the precision of outcomes between nutrients and health, rendering nutrition a purely mathematical and biological science in which eating means ingesting calories and nutrients. Together with healthism and nutritionism, the notion of individual responsibility emerges within the analyzed discourses, combined with a feeling of guilt which in turn becomes a moral burden. This moral prescription facilitates the proliferation of fad diets and the use of substances, supplements and food-remedies as shortcuts to achieve the ideal body, the perfect health and long life. We argue that the complexity of the science of nutrition is far greater than the metric and quantified recommendations, and that the meanings behind eating are considerably broader and deeper than merely the nutrients or calories that we ingest. The discourses on food and diet, when impregnated with the ideology of Nutritionism, distort this intimate and social process, which above all should be mediated by experiences and not by numbers or nutrients.