(Un)health(y) food obsession

I found this article within a blog post discussing how mothers should talk to their daughters about food without leading them into eating disorders. The topic already interested me, so I sought out the linked article, but I think the headline is effective as a tool to draw in readers scanning the paper or the website. "What's Eating Our Kids? Fears About 'Bad' Foods" is not only clever but also apt. "Eating" as a verb is appropriate even without the food context because OCDs eat away at people and, as the end quote says, suck the life out of them. In addition, we stereotype kids as wanting to eat sugary, salty snacks, so the headline played into the novelty of the story--that kids are scared of junk food.

The author specifies in the article that no scientific studies have been done linking parental health food pressure to eating disorders, but numerous specialists have encountered patients that came from health food households and exhibited OCD behavior. The author supports the headline and premise of this article, therefore, by using anecdotes instead of studies. In order to convince the reader that this is a trend, it is necessary to include many separate sources--this article has 14.

The lack of hard evidence makes an objective tone even more necessary. The author does this well by saying several times that no one is criticizing parents for caring about their children's diets, but some parents are taking it to the extreme. She leaves room for doubt by quoting a doctor that says eating disorders are the result of a "disordered psyche," and therefore, it's unfair to blame parents. The author also avoids vilifying these parents by often using words like "may". If she or her editor were less careful, it is possible that she could make Beth Dunn sound like a crazy, abusive parent and the specialists as making definitive conclusions. Dunn still may dislike the context of her story--that her son might be health food obsessed because of her--but I do not think she could sue NYT for defamation of character. The reader can decide at the end whether it is a good thing or not for Beth Dunn's son to be concerned with his sodium intake.

I found a much more sensationalized story on the same topic of health food obsession, but it does not have the parent-child angle. I did not like this story as much because the pictures and stories work to scare the reader. In contrast, the NYT article suggests that there can be too much of a good thing and enabling children to fear rather than simply avoid foods may not be the healthiest approach.