Abstract
This article traces how misinformation occurs and is negotiated in What I Eat In A Day (WIEIAD) videos. Data were collected from 84 WIEIAD videos across 59 YouTube accounts. Our discourse analysis demonstrated that misinformation is presented in ways that invoke expertise, scientific credibility and personal experience, making it more difficult to identify and respond to. Our analysis illustrates how misinformation arises in seemingly mundane sites of discourse and argues that identifying and responding to misinformation is not a binary task. The WIEIAD genre demonstrates the complexity of contemporary wellness discourses and their broader role in health and risk management, which results in the (re)circulation of misinformation. The tension between the sensory and the rational in WIEIAD videos highlights the complexities present in how misinformation, wellness and health are entangled on social media.
Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic made the problem of misinformation more apparent as part of the fabric of our information ecosystem. In the destabilising environment of a rapidly growing and changing pandemic, misinformation became its own pandemic, dubbed by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020) as an ‘infodemic’. Infodemic refers to the high-volume proliferation of misinformation during a disease outbreak (WHO, 2020). The WHO's approach to framing the problem of misinformation presents a stable ontological world, where information is either true or false, and these categories are both broadly recognisable and easily applied.
In this article, we argue that identifying and responding to misinformation is murkier than typical perspectives on misinformation allow. Defining misinforming requires an ‘epistemic consensus’ that it can be defined in reference to (Swire-Thompson & Lazer, 2020: 434). This oppositional approach to categorising misinformation – determined by what it is not, reinforces a binary, ‘truth’-based approach to misinformation. Treating misinformation as a problem to be corrected and moderated produces an outsized focus on providing merely accurate information and ignores the affective and embodied dimensions of knowledge. As such, this article does not present a working definition of misinformation; rather, as per Southerton and Clark (2022), we seek to explore how it is positioned and produced in knowledge flows. In this article, using examples from What I Eat In A Day (WIEIAD) videos on YouTube, we argue that misinformation is affective and embodied, and lives through a complex web of social and technical forces, defying tidy categorisation. This is particularly true in health and health-related fields such as diet and food consumption. We argue that these digital media texts provide insight into the complexity of misinformation and provide valuable insight into how it functions in the (eventual) post-pandemic world.
WIEIAD videos are a ‘slice of life’ that follows the influencer's diet choices for 24 hours. WIEIAD videos are a rich site of analysis, given the contemporary imbrication of food and health. In these videos, YouTubers explain why they are making food choices and how this relates to their understanding of health, desired health outcomes, and other physical (aesthetic) goals. WIEIAD videos are not directly instructive; influencers do not generally use them to make direct recommendations.
In the following sections, we review the role of influencer pedagogy in the circulation of misinformation and explore how wellness culture has shaped contemporary understandings of food and diet expressed in WIEIAD videos. We will then explore misinformation as it specifically relates to health. The article then discusses the methods of data collection and analysis before discussing the results of this research.
Misinformed sharing: personal testimony and influencer pedagogy
Social media is a key site of misinformation partly due to its personal and affective nature. For instance, through ‘affective labour’ (Arthurs et al., 2018: 9), micro-celebrities present themselves as vulnerable and relatable, and cultivate affective relationships based on trust and intimacy. Micro-celebrities, more commonly called influencers, are defined by Abidin (2016: 3) as: ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in ‘digital’ and ‘physical’ spaces, and monetize their following by integrating ‘advertorials’ into their blogs or social media posts and making physical paid-guest appearances at events.
Compared to other video-sharing platforms such as TikTok, YouTube's long-form content helps foster an ‘intense emotional experience’ and ‘social space’ (Soukup, 2014: 4). This quality distinguishes YouTube from other social media platforms and renders it a unique site for analysis. It trades off ‘intimacy as genre and as capital’ (Raun, 2018: 99), suggesting calculated undertones aimed at forming a marketable wellness brand. It also points to the phenomenon of micro-celebrity, which, unlike traditional celebrity, ‘depends on a connection to their audience rather than an enforced separation from them’ (Raun, 2018: 104). Techniques of social media celebrity include ‘anecdotal knowledge’, or individualised accounts of experience, and ‘snoopy sociability’, or the appeal of gaining insight into someone's private life (Hou, 2019: 536). This is key to what renders YouTube so influential, as the viewers trust – and often act on – the advice given to them.
The act of personal testimony also fulfils a ‘public pedagogy’, where social media assumes an ‘instructive’ role in educating individuals on how they frame their bodies and health (Camacho-Miñano et al., 2019: 652). Crucially, this means that their advice is more likely to be internalised and emulated (Camacho-Miñano et al., 2019). While influencers are often derided as unqualified sources of health advice, as Hendry et al. (2021) argue, this does not mean that they are not worth taking seriously. Through influencer pedagogy, viewers trust and feel connected to the influencers they follow, and may adopt their advice and buy products they recommend. Thus, personal testimony means that health misinformation is particularly difficult to demarcate in these spheres, as influencers are speaking as experts based on their own experience. The obligatory disclaimer that viewers are not supposed to implement the behaviour modelled in the videos seems ultimately futile, as social media operates according to an intrinsic logic of comparison. As Tiggemann and Zaccardo observe, the perception of influencers as ‘everyday women … is likely to lead viewers to engage in greater levels of social comparison with them’ (2018: 1004). This problematises the idealistic notion that WIEIAD videos can be consumed without comparison as mere entertainment and inspiration.
Tied to the popularity of WIEIAD is the rise of ‘lifestyle gurus’, who ‘define themselves in opposition to professional cultures’ (Baker & Rojek, 2020b: 390) and tend to promote holistic and alternative health practices. However, in WIEIAD videos, the ostensible eschewing of expert opinion in favour of personal testimony and eating ‘whatever they want’ sits in tension with the medicalised notions of health embedded throughout. This is rendered more palatable, and more likely to go unnoticed, when delivered by ‘lay’ rather than ‘expert’ voices. Again, this illustrates the unique allowances of ‘influencer pedagogy’ and the performance of authenticity. This form of advice risks perpetuating health myths that, while widely disproven, still feel like meaningful health practices, such as detoxing (Meldgaard Kjær, 2019). These forms of health misinformation persist because of native expertise and personal testimony under the ‘it worked for me’ disclaimer. This implicit, rather than explicit, advice-giving allows influencers to spread misinformation disguised as personal experience and erases (some) of the accountability for what they are saying.
A ‘wellness’ approach to food: managing food risks through diet
The WIEIAD genre demonstrates the complexity of contemporary diet discourse and its broader role in health and risk management. WIEIAD videos also illustrate what Schneider and Davis (2010) describe as the ‘problem/solution’ format, where food is presented as the solution to problems located in the body. Consequently, individuals are prompted to constantly scrutinise their diets as both the cause of and solution to what are often simply natural bodily disruptions. WIEIAD videos also function as a type of what Baker and Rojek (2020a) term ‘native knowledge’. In their examination of ‘lifestyle gurus’ or influencers, Baker and Rojek identify the rise of informal ‘coaching’ and the informalisation of everyday life, where advice has become more democratised and accessible with the advent of mass and digital media. This, they argue, has given rise to ‘lifestyle gurus’ who draw from lay and lived experience to dispense advice, either directly or indirectly.
The role of expert advice in negotiating life in late modernity is often understood through Beck's (1992) concept of ‘risk society’. Crawford (2004) has since extended this concept into a broader framework of ‘risk discourse’, which constructs a world full of ‘health hazards’ that the individual must adopt extensive preventative measures to guard against. We argue that this has extended to generate a widespread disposition of food anxiety, as food is constructed as a risk that must be actively managed. In WIEIAD videos, this risk is materialised and managed through consumption practices. As discussed in the results presented below, various strategies are proposed to manage the ‘risk’ that food poses to the body.
There are many reasons why individuals turn to these videos for instruction on how to eat. Crucially, those deemed equipped to dispense this advice are almost invariably young, fit, thin, conventionally attractive and emanate what Nicholls and Gilchrist (2022: 117) describe as a ‘glowing femininity’. Clean eating and other associated wellness practices are presented as a way to achieve this, and slimness is read as an indication that an influencer is ‘looking after’ their health. Their credibility is not conferred through the qualifications they possess, but rather the body they inhabit (Nicholls & Gilchrist, 2022). Having and maintaining a normatively ‘beautiful’ body grants YouTubers creating WIEIAD videos authority on how others might achieve such a body through diet, exercise and other related forms of consumption. As bodies are still read for signs of health, and health is presumed to track alongside body size, content that promises success in managing your body from someone who has successfully achieved the same is particularly potent. Wellness further links the self to the health of the body, reinforcing it as a way of identifying ‘good’ and ‘responsible’ citizenships (Fries, 2008).
While diet trends and fads are frequently debunked, they remain a persistent aspect of contemporary wellness cultures (across online and offline contexts), which Loyer and Knight argue represent a deeper dissatisfaction with ‘dominant food production practices and nutrition discourses’ (2018: 449). The preoccupation with ‘returning’ to a better or purer way of food production and eating facilitates an environment where diet and health misinformation can flourish, focusing on lost or forgotten cures, foods or health practices (Loyer & Knight, 2018). This content is often framed as anti-information (in the Western Enlightenment sense) and pro-intuition. However, the narrative of ‘food as medicine’ often fails to subvert traditional biomedicine in the way it hopes to; rather, it often only perpetuates the neoliberal narrative of healthism and individual responsibility (Fries, 2008). The shift in focus of governance to the individualised self has created the ‘quantitative language of diet, the social meaning of nutritional knowledge, and the context of dietary and bodily self-consciousness and surveillance’ (Bryn Austin, 1999: 162).
Misinformation in/and health
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the topic of misinformation took on new resonance and raised attendant questions of how misleading misinformation, or misinformation, circulates through media ecosystems. Defining misinformation, particularly in health contexts, can be difficult because, as Swire-Thompson and Lazer (2020) highlight, what is considered true and false changes rapidly in response to new research, techniques and methods. This is particularly true for areas such as nutrition science (Vijaykumar et al., 2021) which often lacks the ‘epistemic consensus’ that misinformation is defined in reference to (Swire-Thompson & Lazer, 2020: 434).
Research has also found that misinformation spreads more easily and rapidly than scientific information on social media platforms (Vosoughi et al., 2018). The spread of misinformation has clear implications for health behaviours and is also evident in the spread of anti-vaccination sentiment on social media (Smith & Graham, 2019). Complicating matters, health misinformation is not evenly spread across the social media ecosystem, both in terms of distribution and type of information (Li et al., 2022; Törnberg, 2018). For example, Suarez-Lledo and Alvarez-Galvez (2021) found in their systematic review of the literature that health misinformation is most prevalent on Twitter, with misinformation being most pronounced on health topics on vaccines, drugs or smoking, non-communicable diseases and pandemics. Eating disorders and diet information also formed 9% of the research sampled in this analysis. Crucially, this portion of the study highlights the woolliness of applying misinformation classifications to health advice. The research included by Suarez-Lledo and Alvarez-Galvez (2021) includes pro-anorexia and pro-eating disorder communities. While the information presented in these communities is troubling and does not reflect best-practice health advice, it is not straightforwardly ‘wrong’. As other research has demonstrated (Smith et al., 2015), pro-anorexia communities can also function as sites of harm-minimisation while individuals are not yet in recovery. Health practices are individual, contextual, embodied and particular. Arguably none of us model ‘correct’ or informed health behaviours at all times. Sorting information into good and bad categories erases how and why this information is taken up, how it is lived and the affective aspects that drive this engagement.
Methods
Research examining wellness and diet in online spaces has focused on social networking sites with more visual, short-form content, particularly Instagram (e.g. Camacho-Miñano et al., 2019; Reade, 2021; Tiggemann & Zaccardo, 2018). However, few major studies have focused on YouTube and those that have examined more extreme or subversive food practices such as mukbangs 1 and cheat days (e.g. Lupton, 2020). Focusing on more ‘typical’ WIEIAD videos elucidates a ‘softer’ but nonetheless problematic iteration of the food and wellness culture discourses. By analysing these videos, we suggest that we can better understand how health misinformation is embodied and lived. While WIEIAD videos exist on other social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, this research focuses on WIEIAD videos on YouTube. Videos on YouTube are often longer and more detailed than similar content on TikTok and Instagram, making them rich sites for discourse analysis. The YouTube recommender system and search functions also provide a means for discovering similar content.
Sampling and data collection
The data presented in this article form part of a larger project on diet and wellness discourse present in WIEIAD videos. In sampling for this broader study, we implemented a range of criteria when deciding which YouTubers to focus on for data analysis. The videos were selected based on a combination of prior researcher awareness of prominent YouTubers and through the YouTube algorithmic structures when using the search bar and typing ‘What I Eat In A Day’. Overwhelmingly, the search results were from female influencers. This suggests that wellness-focused diet advice continues to be a feminine-coded practice.
We limited our sampling to YouTubers with 100,000 subscribers or more. This is because, as Hou observes, ‘the number of subscribers on YouTube is an important popular marker indicating a guru's ability to attract engaged and repeatedly returning audiences’ (2019: 536). This suggests that the YouTuber has presented a message or performance of self which has resonated with and been socially sanctioned by the general public. Based on this sampling approach, 84 videos were collected from 1 January to 31 May 2021, ranging in length from under 10 minutes to more than 30 minutes, from 59 YouTubers.
Online research poses a variety of contentious ethical considerations, as it is a site that blurs the public and private realms (Eysenbach & Till, 2001: 1103). We adopt the widely accepted ethical standpoint that putting information online in public-facing spaces means it becomes an object of research in a similar way to other traditional media artefacts (Legewie & Nassauer, 2018). Including the identity of the YouTuber is also key to contextualising their message and brand. However, the comments on YouTube are posted by everyday individuals without a large, personal following. These comments have been de-identified in the analysis that follows.
Analytical approach
To analyse the themes in WIEIAD videos, we adopted a discourse analysis approach to the data as it allowed us to understand current (popular and legitimised) knowledge and how this performs a socialising and regulatory function (Maddox, 2021). This research project sought to understand how, and what kinds of, food and wellness discourses are present in WIEIAD videos. However, we do not claim that the themes identified through this discourse analysis are the final word on how diet and wellness culture can function as a site of misinformation. It is important to acknowledge that ‘discourses are open-ended and incomplete … emergent’ (Dunn & Neumann, 2016: 3). No discourse analysis is complete in itself, and there is always a need for further analysis and monitoring of discursive shifts over time. Adopting a qualitative approach to WIEIAD videos as sites of meaning-making and knowledge circulation allowed us to focus on lay communicative practices around health and diet. The internet provides the ideal site for collecting data which represents how everyday individuals produce and shape discourse.
Our analytical approach focused on identifying the recurring themes and underlying meaning structures shaping WIEIAD videos. We considered similarities and differences in how they conveyed information and what specific – often conflicting – discourses these could be located within. We paid particular attention to instances where creators engaged in health advice-giving, whether implicit or more prescriptive.
The quotes presented in the following analysis are mostly unedited, with punctuation added for clarity. This is key to preserving the ‘raw’ nature of the discourse. It also provides insight into how the YouTubers seek to present a relatable, authentic performance of wellness. As all data were collected from the same year (2021), no year is indicated in the in-text citations. Full bibliographic details are available in the reference list.
Analysis
In this analysis, we explore three key themes that structure how misinformation is framed and circulated in WIEIAD videos on YouTube; deferring to expertise, ‘sciency’ claims and embodied misinformation.
Deferring to expertise: ‘check with your doctor’
While the content of WIEIAD videos is highly individualised and subjective, YouTubers still invoke institutional and scientific expertise. The balancing act between personal experience and more traditional forms of expertise has been noted in previous research on both influencers (e.g. Baker & Rojek 2020a) and advice columns (e.g. Locher 2010), suggesting it has long been a part of advice-giving (even though WIEIADs do not give direct advice). In WIEIAD videos, this balancing act is present in the individualised rationalisation of the presented content. For example, in a video by New York City-based YouTuber Elena Taber, her ‘nutrition coach’ friend Ashley defines ‘bio-individuality’ as ‘what works for you may not work for everyone else’ (Taber, 2021: 06:39). This encapsulates the subtle way in which influencers can defer responsibility for any potentially harmful impacts on their viewers, as they stress their content is for ‘inspiration only’ rather than comparison or prescription. WIEIAD content is not styled as health advice but rather as health experience. The emphasis on ‘personal testimony,’ or what Baker and Rojek (2020a) identify as ‘native knowledge’ in WIEIAD videos, means that the content shared often avoids scrutiny as sites of health misinformation.
In another example of ‘deferred expertise’, American lifestyle vlogger Maggie MacDonald offers the following explanation for her diet: ‘I worked with a dietician and those are just things that we talked about personally for my body that I need to do’ (2021: 03:19). This statement implies that because she has seen a dietician, her approach to food and diet is credible and medically sanctioned. This leaves little room for her audience to contest the claimed ‘healthiness’ of her diet approach. This also demonstrates how YouTube encompasses a hybrid approach of endorsing self-autonomy in health while still constructing health behaviours in reference to Western biomedicine (Shorofi, 2011).
Within the WIEIAD videos collected and analysed for this research, there is a palpable sense that these influencers are aware of, and almost apologetic for their professed lack of expert knowledge. Kylie Ross describes how in creating her WIEIAD video, ‘I was hesitant because I am not a registered dietician and there is already so much, like, misinformation about macros out there I didn’t want to be like adding to that’ (Ross, 2021: 1:00). She then proceeds to recommend (without being sponsored) the Carbon Diet coach app, explaining that, ‘I just genuinely love it … they set your macros for you so you don’t have to do any of the work which was the scary part for me’ (Ross, 2021: 01:45). This allows her to overcome her professed lack of qualifications by effectively passing over health expertise to what is supposedly an objective, technoscientific source of health information, which further works to affirm their legitimacy as health intervention (Clark et al., 2022; Lyall, 2021). This form of (perceived) objective information is often used to lend legitimacy to the WIEIAD YouTuber's personal testimony. While they may position themselves as sharing ‘what works for them’, their use of external and scientific-seeming sources of expertise means that their personal testimony begins to take on the authority of evidence-based advice.
‘Sciency’ claims: legitimising diet advice
Alongside the deferral to (unseen) experts, WIEIAD videos also use ‘sciency’ language to shape the information they present. By ‘sciency’, we mean language that appears scientific but is actually meaningless or misleading. This includes the use (and misuse) of open-access journal articles to support claims that fall outside of routine health advice. For example, anti-vaccination communities online regularly use old, debunked or poor-quality research to lend scientific legitimacy to their claims (van Schalkwyk, 2020). In our analysis, WIEIAD videos often contain pseudoscientific or ‘sciency’ claims rooted in moralised notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, or as it is now more commonly expressed, ‘whole’ foods. Black American lifestyle vlogger Kera Ariyel (2021) explains that she is ‘super cautious’ about the food she consumes and privileges ‘clean … all-natural products’ (2021: 04:32). She further states, ‘I think we all need to detox our body, like that's the main thing that keeps us like bloated is not being able to detox and get all that gunk out’ (Ariyel, 2021: 06:19). This reflects a demonisation of ‘processed foods’ which originates more from a vague fear of ‘chemicals’ and ‘additives’ than a scientific basis. The concept of a detox in and of itself is a form of misinformation. Bodies do not routinely require ‘detoxing’, having kidneys and a liver that accomplish this for us. However, the fear of a toxified, sluggish body is rendered visceral through the embodied language of ‘bloated’ and ‘gunk’, which evokes an image of ‘modern’ food as risky and polluting the body (Baker & Rojek, 2020a). Detox diets and cleanses continue to be a popular way of managing this risk, even though the practice itself is frequently debunked (e.g. Goldacre, 2009). This echoes themes found in research on other wellness and diet trends. For example, Gressier describes how the Paleo diet romanticises a perceived ancient, natural way of eating and frames modern processed food as ‘a potent product and symbol of the failures of neoliberalism’ (2021: 5–6). The key similarity is that both approaches frame modern food and diet practices as polluting or toxic, thus the body must either be cleansed or cured by adopting an alternative ‘cleaner’ diet.
WIEIAD videos also promote the idea that there is no bodily ailment that cannot be solved through diet – or the ‘food as medicine’ narrative – which is both culturally and biomedically prevalent and arguably misinformed (Wolrich, 2021). Chanel Coco Brown, a black British lifestyle vlogger and former model, speaks enthusiastically about how ‘whenever I feel fatigued my body aches or I can feel…a cough or a sore throat coming…I truly believe all of these can be healed by your diet’ (Brown, 2021: 00:38). The key takeaway from this is that whenever experiencing illness, our first step should be to consider lifestyle factors rather than consulting a doctor. While good nutrition may support recovery from a bout of illness, food cannot ‘heal’ a virus. Despite this, the focus on lifestyle factors reflects the shift from a passive to an active role for the patient in healthcare, framed through the emphasis on self-care and preventative medicine, both of which form key parts of wellness culture (Kent, 2020). These themes highlight the mixed messaging so prevalent in online spaces, specifically social media.
While WIEIAD creators encourage their viewers to ‘consult’ a doctor, they also argue that wellness can be individually managed through diet. Broadly, we found that WIEIAD creators slide between scientific or ‘sciency’ rationales while claiming that they are just sharing their personal experience. On one hand, they are claiming to present ‘completely objective’ information (Kathleen, 2021: 01:00, 00:46), yet this sits in tension with the discourses of bio-individuality and personal experience. This tension between external expertise and personal experience was also noted in Hendry et al.'s (2021) examination of fitness influencer Ashy Bines, where they note that a key tension in her content is ‘personal experience is your guide but always defer to institutional expertise’ (2021: 9). While neither of these approaches is unequivocally misinformation, they demonstrate the complex churning of health and diet advice online, in which misinformation can circulate and find acceptance through repetition, as is the case in common discourses of clean food and detoxifying cleanses.
Embodied misinformation: feeling ‘light and airy’
One of the more dominant ways of narrating decisions around food consumption in WIEIAD videos is by focusing on how food makes WIEIAD creators feel both physically and mentally. This can be observed in how former Victoria's Secret model Sanne Vloet (2021) describes food, with distinctly affective language, as ‘light’ and ‘airy’ (02:08) or ‘clean’ (07:39), or how it makes her feel ‘clear’ (00:57). This echoes the language celebrities like Paltrow and Beyoncé use to discuss their diets and detoxes. These discourses emphasise benefits such as mental clarity and feeling ‘lighter’ (Meldgaard Kjær, 2019).
This embodied logic is reflected in Vloet's WIEIAD video, which conveys a sense of food as almost spiritual, purifying her insides and, to offer a more literal interpretation, avoiding foods that are conversely ‘heavy’ and weigh her down. This constructs a deeply abstract way of conveying information about the ‘healthiness’ of food, implicit in it being ‘light’. In 1983, the food and diet industry came up with the effective marketing ploy of introducing ‘lite’ fat-reduced or calorie-reduced foods, which resulted in the consumer equating ‘lightness’ with health’ (Hesse-Biber, 1997: 36). Here the lightness of food, is the lightness of the individual, a discourse which (re)centres the individual's embodied feeling as a way of sensing and assessing whether individual diet choices are ‘right’. It does not matter if a detox or equivalent wellness practice holds up to scientific scrutiny; what matters is how it makes us feel. Wellness practices that produce positive affects are good because they feel good.
Another way influencers promote ‘healthy eating’ is by adopting something akin to a life coach persona. Fernanda Ramirez explains: A lot of people ask like how do you get the motivation to eat healthy and honestly you know when you eat something good and it makes you feel good inside and you can feel the difference when you eat something bad. (2021: 07:58)
Control is also part of the continued importance of the connection between bodily appearance and self-worth. For example, Molly-Mae reflects on her fitness journey, ‘I’m proud of myself to be honest… I’ve actually managed to sort of turn over a leaf and just feel so much better about myself like I literally feel like a new person’ (Hague, 2021: 06:56). While creators in WIEIAD videos rarely explicitly command their audience to implement lifestyle changes, they make it clear that doing so makes you an inherently better person (Meldgaard Kjær, 2019). There is a great deal of societal validation that stems from embodying the wellness lifestyle, and this is evident in the language of being ‘proud’ of oneself through the exercise of control. Here it no longer matters whether detoxes, diets, and other patterns of eating are scientifically validated. What matters is how this knowledge is embodied and lived, and how it makes us feel. This illustrates the affective, lived aspect of misinformation as a practice. When the focus is on how we feel, whether information is true becomes less important than how it is lived and realised day to day, and whether it produces (perceived) energetic affects, to control the seemingly constant battle against feeling low, sluggish and bloated.
Discussion
Positioning the body in misinformation flows
Examining WIEIAD videos demonstrates these creators’ complex production of health and diet information. In this context, we can see that misinformation is managed and circulated in a variety of ways that make it difficult to sort into tidy categories of true and false. The sticky and embodied aspects of misinformation are particularly potent when they imbricate bodies, and bodily practices, mediated through the lens of ‘personal experience’.
The emphasis on personal experience makes it more complicated to draw the line between ‘true’ and ‘false’. Social media – and in the context of YouTube specifically, video production and editing – allows influencers to selectively present their lives (Nicholls & Gilchrist, 2022). The techniques of video production also reinforce the influencer as expert. Creators employ lighting to enhance the skin, and to communicate an otherworldly, luminous embodiment of wellness (Wilkes, 2021). These videos present a ‘highlight reel’ (Reade, 2021: 536), and the practices presented become normalised as mundane, everyday life.
While this is not explicit in our analysis, our research also suggests a gendered dimension to the types of misinformation people encounter and how they encounter it. Women continue to dominate the genre of WIEIAD videos and the wellness space more broadly. In wellness spaces, we can observe how capitalism has shifted from facilitating the ‘external control of women's bodies’ to now the more ‘internal … self-imposed body practices and rituals’ (Hesse-Biber, 1997: 20). It does not matter whether the wellness practices and food regimes touted in these videos work, what matters is that they provide resources to support the process of what Cairns and Johnston (2015: 157) term ‘calibration – the process of continual adjustment to meet an idealised and elusive feminine standard’. This involves a fraught performance of the self, negotiating a conscientious, but never obsessive, self-regulation of health. WIEIAD content reinforces ingrained understandings that certain (clean) ways of eating produce certain bodies, which form a crucial part of the criteria for the ‘desirable woman’ and a healthy citizen. In modern wellness culture, in addition to aesthetic goals, there is the pressure to closely monitor how the body performs and whether it embodies an enhanced state of health. As O’Neill (2020: 3) argues, ‘health is understood not simply as freedom from disease, but a kind of preternatural exuberance and luminous vitality’. Women, specifically, are not supposed to look tired or drained, but rather always glowing and radiant.
Expertise, misinformation and wellness in WIEIAD
Health misinformation is partly driven by the affective intensities of parasocial influencer/follower and celebrity/fan relationships. However, with a greater plurality of knowledge comes increasing confusion over which knowledge is trustworthy (Brown & Baker, 2012). The affective nature of social media engagement, carefully calibrated by influencers, makes it an ideal site for studying misinformation's fuzzy, grey and embodied aspects. It also highlights the mundane aspects of much misinformation generation, which is sustained and circulated through personal and emotional entanglement.
In Gressier's (2021) examination of the Paleo diet community in Australia, she found a preference for affective and personal modes of communication about the benefits of the Paleo diet. When content shifted to more straightforward science communication, members of the Paleo community expressed a ‘desire for charismatic leaders and anecdotal above scientific knowledge’ (Gressier, 2021: 8). This preference for personal experience and personal testimony is reflected in the WIEIAD videos. Learning from familiar others and through their experiences appears to be more compelling and engaging than dry scientific discourse. Indeed, scientific communication itself is not straightforwardly factual. Hervik et al. (2021) demonstrate that the ‘sugar is toxic’ narrative is based on an oversimplification of scientific literature and created moral panic around individuals’ sugar consumption. It also demonstrates the potent entanglement of emotion with food, diet and health behaviour, making them particularly sticky sights of misinformation, which is further apparent in our analysis of WIEIAD videos. The mix of scientific evidence, ideology and emotion create an, ‘at times, chaotic and confusing information environment’ (Hervik et al., 2021: 10) that is not easily fixed by policing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ facts.
As we have demonstrated, it is possible to identify different categories of misinformation, each with its own issues and nuances, which both call to (through deferred expertise and ‘sciency’ claims) and reject established forms of knowledge. However, what is becoming more common, in line with the rise of holistic wellness culture, is the embodied and individualised rationalisation of diet. Influencers no longer describe food itself as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ as this is criticised as promoting the toxic moralisation of food; instead, the focus shifts onto how food elicits good or bad bodily feelings. The disclaimer that ‘everyone has different needs’ is easy to overlook; after all, influencers occupy an aspirational role; we want to consume the products they consume, and emulate the lifestyle they embody, to achieve a desirable aesthetic. This renders much health-related misinformation deeply subjective and makes for complex and confusing territory to navigate.
In establishing credibility through deferred expertise, WIEIAD creators take on both the authority of this expertise, while minimising its responsibilities. This pedagogical two-step also highlights the continued hegemony of healthism as an ideology structuring our everyday lives, asking us to ‘take charge’ of our health. Lawrence argues that the pace and scope of medicalisation, along with broader social issues, including racism, colonialism and for-profit medicine, has shaped a public that is ‘highly and, in some cases, perhaps overly sensitized towards matters of wellness, health and fitness but who are increasingly overwhelmed by the availability of medical and clinical knowledges and the accelerated rate of change in guidance’ (2022: 5). These wellness practices, mediated through various influencers, have stepped into the space Lawrence (2022: 5) identifies as the ‘critical distance’ between medicine and the general public. This gap also provides space for misinformation to circulate and become mundane through lived wellness practices.
Lawrence argues that ‘post-truth’ attitudes, characterised by a determined ignorance of medical knowledge, have shaped the space that wellness practices inhabit. The increase in demand for – and lack of availability of – traditional medical services has also created the space for ‘digital content espousing “alternative,” simplified and accessible knowledges of wellness, health and fitness’ (Lawrence, 2022: 5). While Lawrence argues that ignorance of medical knowledge has profoundly shaped the wellness space, as demonstrated in this research, WIEIAD videos reflect a more complicated relationship to traditional forms of expertise. Additionally, influencers draw on their relatability and perceived authenticity to underscore their position, stressing that they are just ordinary people who should not be expected always to provide correct information and be the perfect role model. However, they do impact social norms and expectations. Duffy and Chan's (2019) notion of ‘imagined surveillance’, unique to social media, where one perceives potential scrutiny and seeks to prevent it through a carefully curated presentation of the self, is relevant to the construction of ordinariness here. It seems that, despite the abundance of WIEIADs titled ‘realistic’, any real authenticity is almost impossible, as the YouTuber offers a performance inevitably mediated by the expectations of others.
Conclusion: one day of eating
The creators of WIEIAD YouTube videos often emphasise that what they are presenting is ‘just one day of eating’. This emphasis on WIEIAD videos as ‘snapshots’ acknowledges the bracketed and partial view into their food and wellness practices that these videos present. However, past, present, and community practices inform the ‘day’ presented. This is evident in the overwhelming level of lifestyle homogeneity in WIEIAD. This generates a fragmented way of reproducing discourse; they speak individually but accumulate into an overarching fitness culture, establishing legitimacy through ubiquity.
YouTubers confess to ‘falling off’ the wellness wagon and imagine their better, future selves as they walk their viewers through a day in the life of. In narrating their routine, creators emphasise their direct sensory experience as it relates to their wellness practices, leaning into an embodied way of knowing to determine the correct application of food and exercise.
Thinking about the body as a way of knowing through affective encounters (Deleuze, 1988) refocuses our attention on the sensory as a means of thinking about and responding to the ‘problem’ of misinformation. Focusing on the sensory and the embodied aspects of knowing expands our understanding of misinformation from the informational, to the lived and felt. This opens a way of thinking through engagements with misinformation that are not simply cognitive processes or beliefs, but rather are experienced in felt ways that exist beyond and before conscious understanding. Positioning the body in misinformation flows requires a more nuanced approach to misinformation that acknowledges its contextual and cultural location as well as attending to how it is lived and felt by individuals in personal and not easily predictable ways.
On a practical level, understanding how misinformation circulates in and through body/media entanglements has implications for the moderation of misinformation on platforms like YouTube. YouTube has been the focus of considerable effort by Google to moderate misinformation on the platform during the pandemic. Google's misinformation policies (Google, 2023) attempt to delineate misinformation clearly by defining it in relation to the ‘serious risk of egregious harm’. The narrowly focused scope of this policy allows ‘softer’ and more culturally normalised forms of misinformation (for example, detoxing) to continue to circulate on the platform. In focusing on clearly defined cases of harm, we can also see a tacit acknowledgement that misinformation is, as we have argued, personal, context and lived in complex ways that most misinformation policies struggle to account for.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
