Professor and Sugar Rush author Karen Throsby returns for a bonus episode to discuss how her own relationship with sugar has changed since before she wrote her book, the role of influencers and social media in spreading anti-sugar messages, why news media report so uncritically on government recommendations to cut sugar, and more.
Karen Throsby is Professor of Gender Studies and the Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. She has been researching issues of gender, technology, bodies and health for over 20 years, including work on reproductive technologies, weight loss surgery and endurance sport. She is the author of Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Identity and Embodiment (Manchester University Press, 2016), When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and most recently, Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness (Manchester University Press, 2023).
Resources and References
Karen’s latest book, Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Hey there. Welcome to this bonus episode of Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is professor and Sugar Rush author, Karen Throsby, who returns for a bonus interview to discuss how her own relationship with sugar has changed since before she wrote her book, the role of influencers and social media in spreading anti-sugar messages, why news media report so uncritically on government recommendations to cut sugar, and more. Now without any further ado, let's go to my conversation with Karen Throsby. So Karen, welcome back. Thank you so much for sticking around for this bonus episode.
Karen Throsby: Thank you.
Christy Harrison: I want to start off by talking a little bit about your own relationship with sugar and maybe with food in general and how it's changed since you wrote the book. We talked a little bit about that at the end of the main episode, but I think there's more to delve into here.
Karen Throsby: Yeah, I mean it's an interesting thing because if you write a book about food or a food, different kinds of food, people will start to scrutinize what you eat. And this is something that I noticed. So for example, if I will go to a conference, an academic conference, and it's the break time and there's always, there'll be biscuits and cake and things like this, sweet treats with coffee. And I did start to notice that people were kind watching to see if I ate it, which of course that whole dynamic of people watching people eat and surveilling is a part of diet-culture that is very disturbing and strange. But what was interesting for me is that, so I'm a vegan and so in general I am not able to eat most of those foods which will have dairy products in them. So I don't eat them for other reasons, and that's a food ethics choice in my case.
But people would then assume that I'm not eating it because of sugar, but then would kind of say, well, isn't that kind of against your message when you say you are saying it's not bad and yet you seem to be avoiding it? And so there were all these kind of misunderstandings and people watching. And then the other thing that people would do was actually apologize to me for eating sugar in front of me, or they'd confess the kind of, I'm eating this, but I'll be good tomorrow. People would say that kind of thing to me. And for me, this is very disturbing that people would feel like I was watching their consumption, which I was not, but also to have my own food consumption watched. And then I never really want to announce in that moment that I'm a vegan because that's opened up a whole other sort set of sets, other can of worms there that I don't necessarily want to get into.
And so it created all kinds of interesting things for me. But one of the reasons, I mean I said in the main podcast that I never actually gave up sugar at any point. I didn't even try it just as an experiment. And one of the reasons is because I'm a vegan, I feel like there's already a certain amount of restriction in my diet. I don't experience it as restriction, but I am cutting out foods and I was of really reluctant to get into a kind of cutting out yet more foods and creating kind of endless restrictions in my diet. So I am a vegan, I don't drink caffeine, which is for sleep reasons, and I've always felt like that's enough in terms of the way I control what I eat and manage what I eat, that's enough for me. And so I don't then closely scrutinize any other aspect of my diet
Christy Harrison: That sounds really helpful for your relationship with food. And I'm so struck by the difference between that and say vegan influencers on social media who are like, do this vegan cleanse and you're cutting out sugar and you're cutting out carbs and you're cutting out all these things or whatever. It's like the piling on of different restrictions just has become so commonplace. There are people who are vegan for ethical reasons and there are people who are vegan for maybe ethical reasons at some level. But then also there's this health stuff mixed in and there's this weight stuff mixed in and it becomes such a slippery slope. I think when you approach it in that way,
Karen Throsby: It's tricky to disentangle it because I also personally find it a very healthful way to eat. But the element of restriction I think is something that for me was quite important.
Christy Harrison: Speaking of influencers, do you have any thoughts on the role of influencers and social media in spreading anti-sugar messages?
Karen Throsby: I mean particularly in that decade where we had this real anti-sugar thing. I mean it was everywhere and on social media, it was everywhere. And I think it becomes a way, these are people who are making money from their work on social media and this becomes following trends or leading trends as one of the ways in which they make money. And then there's this very idealized self-representation of these quite beautiful people and very, a lot of restriction, but leading these sort of rather glamorous lives. And I think sugar just became such an easily recognizable way to signal some kind of virtue. Giving up sugar becomes a way of signaling virtue of good behavior of self-care. And so I think it was such an obvious target. It is such an obvious target for people working in that sphere. But I also think that we should avoid an easy assumption that influencers exercise influence in a really straightforward way, that there's not a simple cause and effect.
Just because influencer A says this, it doesn't mean that you would automatically do that. Those messages make sense to us that you should give up. Sugar, for example, makes sense to us because that message is already circulating in the public domain. It already makes sense to us in a sense. So they're of riding on to some extent and intensifying a narrative about food that is already just already in our minds, already in our social worlds. And so one of their skills, if you like, one of the influencer skills is kind of picking up on those trends and running with it, but we need to look at the broader social world as well to understand why that would make sense, why they could do that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's such a great point. They wouldn't have influence in the first place if they weren't tapping into something that was already in the zeitgeist and that was legible to people in some way.
Karen Throsby: Yeah, exactly.
Christy Harrison: Well, speaking of social media, I'm also interested in the role of media, sort of traditional media in all of this. And you talked a lot about newspapers and was so interesting to see the quotes from newspapers in your book. And one of the stories you tell is in 2015, the UK's Scientific and Advisory committee on Nutrition released a report recommending that people cut their sugar consumption, added sugar consumption to an extremely low and yet strangely round number, I won't say the number because I don't want to activate anything for listeners, but it was like this very low and seemingly sort of arbitrary number. And you write about how the popular press in the UK reported on this recommendation. And I was just struck by how credulous the papers were that there was no effort to question how they came up with that number, why it was such a round number. And you talked in the, I mean maybe you can discuss this, but one expert called it something like a back of the envelope calculation, but why do you think the media don't challenge stuff like this and just report credulously on these kinds of recommendations?
