Nutritional Health Messages in Women’s Magazines: A Conflicted Space for Women Readers

Abstract

Media representations of food are ubiquitous in contemporary society, and healthy eating features predominantly in such texts. This study explores the discursive construction of food and healthy eating in texts appearing in popular women’s magazines, and examines the variety of positions and subjectivities offered to women readers of these texts. We find that such texts present quite complex constructions of nutritional health, based on scientific and biomedical discourses of nutrition interwoven with discourses of morality, feminine beauty and mothering. We conclude that these texts offer a conflictual space for women to traverse in efforts to position themselves as good mothers and moral and healthy eaters.