Dear Diet Culture Letter: You Ruin Fruits & Veggies

Dear Diet Culture,

It’s me, Sunday. Let’s get straight to it: you ruin fruit and vegetables. For so much of your existence, you have insisted that people consume fruits and veggies as a way to be “healthy.” You have told them via diets, government programs, social media influencers, health care practitioners, personal trainers, and so many more that fruits and veggies are some of the MOST important foods that people should consume. You essentially can’t get enough of telling people to “eat more fruits and veggies.”

Now on the surface, I can imagine you arguing that this is “health promoting” and that people NEED to be told what to do, how to eat, how much to eat, when to eat; essentially that their eating needs to be controlled or else they will be “out of control.” Left to their own devices, you say, people will only eat cake and cookies, and so we have to tell them over and over and over and over to eat more fruits and veggies. So what’s the problem here?

Well, there are many.

Fruits and veggies are incredibly voluminous which means that when consumed in larger quantities they don’t leave much room (sometimes no room at all), for more energy dense food groups like carbs, protein, and fats (macro-nutrients) that human bodies need. You force the rhetoric around fruits and veggies being the “most important” foods, but negate to tell people that without enough energy from food and without enough macro-nutrients, the body has a really hard time absorbing and digesting all those micro-nutrients from the veggies and fruits. Not to mention, you cannot trick the body into needing less food by eating fruits and veggies to “fill up.” After years of evolution, our bodies are VERY wise.

In addition to this, you really like to tell people how to eat their fruits and vegetables. There have been many times that you have told people to only eat them raw, other times boiled, other times paired with only certain kinds of oils, etc. And depending on the diet du jour, you tell people to keep eating them, to ignore their hunger/fullness cues, and to eat them even if they don’t like them. “Just plug your nose,” you say.

In all of your rigid, rule-base recommendations you don’t seem to talk about how fruits and vegetables are hard on the digestive system. This means that all of your pushing to make people eat more veggies/fruits can really upset their stomachs. You very quickly like to blame this on whatever food group is demonized at the time, dairy and gluten being common ones today. Bloating, loose bowls, and gas are all common symptoms of too much veggie/fruit consumption. And yet even when this is happening, you tell people to keep eating more to “resolve” their digestive upset. It’s absurd!

What’s most important here is that I am not anti-fruits and veggies despite what you and the internet might think about Intuitive Eating (IE) or Health At Every Size (HAES). What I am against is forcing people to eat foods that they don’t like. I’m against your recommendations being the start of people’s eating disorder or disordered eating. I’m against not including privilege and access into your recommendations around fruits and veggies. I’m against outdated and harmful rhetoric around trying to “trick” the body into consuming foods that take up space but don’t give the body the energy it needs. I’m against you taking away veggies and fruits as something to be enjoyed as part of a meal and making them mandatory, adding rigid rules, and causing people to feel downright tired of them.

Diet Culture, per usual you ruin so much. You have ruined fruits and vegetables for so many people making them a “tool” for controlling their body shape and size rather than a potentially yummy addition to other foods that they are consuming. You have have tried to control people’s intake of fruits and veggies and because of this, it often takes months to years for people to heal their relationship to veggies and fruit because of how negatively you impact them with your recommendations.

And we are tired of it.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most passionate anti-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that diet culture is filled with very disordered and privileged recommendations around fruits and vegetables, and that diet culture wants you to believe that your your body cannot be trusted to meet its needs without talking about the impact of restriction and habituation on your eating choices and preferences.