While We Debate Salad Dressing...
How seed oils and food dye became the connective tissue between health policy and disordered eating...
The other day, I was eating an English muffin with cream cheese, minding my business, when I opened my phone to yet another panic spiral about seed oils, food dyes, and how “clean eating” is the only path to health.
And all I could think was:
The problem isn’t seed oil. It’s that we’re debating salad dressing and panicking over Pop-Tarts while the government is actively defunding survival. Focus.
I shared about this in a brief post on Instagram a few days ago, but thought I’d expand on the underlying points here — specifically to highlight how this intersects with disordered eating recovery and body autonomy.
Right now, Congress is considering a bill that would gut Medicaid by $700 billion over the next decade. It would add punishing red tape — layers of paperwork and confusing requirements that could push millions of people out of coverage, not because they’re no longer eligible, but because the system would become too hard to navigate.
They’re also proposing the largest cut to food assistance in U.S. history: about $280–$300 billion slashed from SNAP (formerly food stamps), a program that helps people afford groceries and feed their families. This means that millions of children, seniors, veterans, folks with disabilities, and low-income families could lose these benefits altogether or have their assistance dramatically reduced.
And while this is happening, the loudest conversations about health are occurring on TikTok and Instagram, obsessing over canola oil in dressing, pushing high-protein everything, and insisting you hack your blood sugar curve.
Let me be clear: “Clean eating” will not clean up this mess.
The trends on social media that capitalize on food fear-mongering directly increase rates of eating disorders while also using anti-science rhetoric to confuse the public about nutrition.
When people are losing the ability to even afford groceries, the threat to public health isn’t in our pantry — it’s in the budget.
Health is not determined by whether your butter is grass-fed or your crackers are organic. It’s determined by whether you have access. Enoughness. The ability to feed yourself and your loved ones — consistently, safely, and without shame.
And if you’re in recovery from disordered eating, or supporting others in that work, this moment matters. Deeply. Because disordered eating doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s shaped by scarcity and shame. By a culture that moralizes food and worships “willpower” while stripping people of the very resources that make nourishment possible.
You can’t eat intuitively if there isn’t food in the fridge.
You can’t build trust with your body if you’ve been taught it’s too expensive to care for.
You can’t recover if the very conditions that fed your disorder are being legislated back into your life.
If policies go into place that deepen food insecurity and defund healthcare, we will see more food preoccupation, more obsession, more shame — not because people are vain or undisciplined, but because they are hungry. Physically, emotionally, and psychologically.
And what the media often calls “food noise” is a biological alarm: the body sounding its sirens in response to not having enough.
This is how disordered eating starts — not only in the mirror, but in the margins. In the systems and spreadsheets of those who see human life as a line item.
Body liberation isn't just about healing our personal relationships with food. It's about fighting for a world where everyone has the right to eat, rest, and access care without conditions. It’s about true body autonomy — the kind that exists outside of the conditioning we’ve received about what to eat, how much to weigh, and what dictates our worth.
Recovery can’t just be individual — it has to be collective. Otherwise, we’re just learning to “love our bodies” in a system still designed to punish them.
The most important nutrition policy isn’t trending on social media.
It’s being debated behind closed doors, where decisions are being made about who deserves to eat and who deserves to be cared for. Because SNAP and Medicaid are not luxuries, they are lifelines. And if we care about health, we have to care about justice. If we care about nutrition, we have to protect the systems that help people access food. Because the real threat to our well-being isn’t seed oil, it’s policies that tell people they’re on their own.
Here’s what you can do:
Remember that fears you have about food, and how that is being perpetuated by the news headlines, is deeply tied to diet cul
ture and wellness culture. It’s not about health, it’s about control and distraction.
Call your representatives and tell them to vote no on Medicaid and SNAP cuts.
Donate to local food banks and advocacy organizations fighting food insecurity.
Keep asking: Who is profiting off our distraction? And who is being harmed by our silence?
Share this message. Shift the conversation.
As always, please let me know how you’re doing in the comments, and any thoughts that have come up for you on this topic. You’re not alone. Stay close to yourself, stay in your body, keep feeding yourself.
I keep coming back to and re-reading this post every day when I’m faced with a new slew of anti-fat, pro-diet content on my LinkedIn feed. Forever grateful for you, Abbie!!!
I also think an important part of this conversation is the ignorant and despicable RFK and his MAHA movement, specifically with gutting the FDA and stripping regulations to make food safe. We had/have regulations in place to prevent horrible fillers, to monitor food borne illness/bacterias etc. people will get so sick. And we aren’t monitoring disease and illness anymore at the level acceptable to prevent food borne or other illnesses. And naturally, as is true always, the marginalized (poor and BIPOC and disabled etc) populations will always get hurt first. But in a fascist “America First” model, they are viewed as expendable. The scary thing is, any illness could land all of us disabled or poor, and so we are all far closer to “expendable” than not during this time. No one in the current admin/regime has any care for humanity. That is a fact at this rate.