31st January 2019
social media

Pretty Ugly. The Dark Side of Social Media.

You wake up and the first thing you do is reach for your phone and have a quick scroll through your Instagram feed. You look in the mirror and maybe what you see doesn’t reflect what you’d just seen in the 50 photos you’ve just browsed. Maybe your house isn’t as tidy and picture perfect. Maybe your wardrobe isn’t as curated and on trend. It’s 7.30am and you already feel inadequate. Sound familiar? Is social media actually damaging our mental health or is it just a bit of fun that we take with a pinch of salt? Does social media distort body image? Believe it or not, there are several studies that show that the more time you spend on […]
10th April 2017
Cave

Honesty and echo chambers in nutrition science

The times they are a-changin’.  OK so to Jo(e) Public, the world of nutrition probably remains largely the same, a smorgasboard of Instagrammed avocado on toast and inexplicably complicated diets needlessly eliminating one or other food group for optimal ‘wellness’.  But in the world of nutrition experts, endlessly battling pseudoscience and fads from every angle, there has been a small shift, a disturbance in clean eating’s force, maybe.  As we see some of the myths surrounding clean eating being debunked, are we witnessing the first stages of a triumph of evidence over pseudoscience?   Social media – a goldmine of nutribollox It’s very easy to be taken in, especially when the sphere of health on social media is so dominated […]
18th January 2017

Does social media distort body image?

Social media can be a tremendous force for good but does its darker side harbour problems for our body image and mental health?  I review the evidence and offer suggestions for how we deal with this potential ticking time bomb for our mental health.   Much research has shown, over the last two decades, that the ‘thin ideal’ portrayed in the traditional media (films, television, magazines, billboards etc.) is linked to negative body image and subsequently an increased risk of disordered eating.  The near constant presence of this thin ideal in some areas of the media normalise a body type that for most is neither realistic nor achievable but once this image becomes internalised in an individual, it becomes a […]