Using Fat Acceptance to Sell Junk Food

A dietitian on TikTok tells you to eat Cocoa Puffs without guilt. A fat activist gets paid by an ice cream company. A cereal manufacturer spends millions lobbying against health labels. The movement that promised to free you from shame has been bought by the very industry that made you sick.An investigation by The Washington Post and The Examination uncovered that General Mills, the maker of Cocoa Puffs, Golden Grahams and Cheerios, secretly funded dietitians to push sugar-laden products using body positive hashtags like #DerailTheShame [citation:4]. The company even funded a study to argue that warning labels on sugary cereal would be "food shaming" [citation:8]. Meanwhile, Unilever, the parent company of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, backed San Francisco's "weight stigma czar" Virgie Tovar, a prominent fat activist who defines "fatphobia" as bigotry [citation:5]. A bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios contains four teaspoons of sugar, almost 70 percent of the daily recommended allowance [citation:4]. The bodies paying for the messages are the same ones profiting from the obesity crisis.Turn down the lights, put on your headphones, and press play because the person telling you to love your body might be getting paid by the people destroying it.