POWERED BY HEALTH: HEALTHISM IN FOOD MARKETING AND CONSUMER RESEARCH. A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS.

Health has become so tightly connected to food that it feels omnipresent in the food marketplace and marketing research journals. In fact, the omnipresence of food brands with health-related value propositions and the ever-growing abundance of marketing research dedicated to health and food consumption are symptomatic of the same issue: the power of a cultural discourse that establishes health as a super-value and a personal responsibility, known as the ideology of healthism. The implications of healthism are controversial. On the one hand, healthism produces an environment for empowerment, increased health involvement and political democratization. On the other, it creates messages about appropriate and responsible forms of consumption, individuals’ freedoms and duties, moralization, the promotion of some interests at the expense of others, health-related anxieties, cost increase, etc. In the social reality increasingly defined and structured by markets, understanding how marketing discourse frames health in the context of food may be one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of understanding healthism. Founded in social construction of reality perspective and theoretical lens of critical social research, this work examines marketing knowledge about health, its underlying assumptions, social implications and consequences that are routinely overlooked. By conducting a review and a critical discourse analysis of a systematically produced sample of 190 marketing and consumer research publications about health and food, this study revealed research trends in the field, mapped the structure of research streams, and identified three dominant, co-existing discourses. The three discourses –“nutri/edu” discourse, “simple solutions” discourse, and “win-win” discourse – employ different food-related meanings and problematizations, rationalize healthism using different appeals and arguments, and produce different solutions for consumer wellbeing and empowerment. Each discourse thereby establishes the market reality of food as the main stage for enactment of responsibility for health. The three discourses with their respective vocabularies provide a common interpretative frame equally suitable for scholars, marketers, policymakers and consumers. The variation among the three discourses demonstrates the power of healthism, which offers an internally complex and heterogeneous system of meanings that nevertheless provides a unifying, value-based platform for various market actors. Health thus has an ideological function in marketing and consumer research – it helps establish a higher level of legitimacy for the arguments about the nature of consumer choice, the food industry and marketing discipline and practice. Discerning underlying assumptions about health and food in marketing discourse works as both a critical assessment of marketing scholars’ taken for granted assumptions and as a stepping stone to better understand how public discourse shapes the social reality of markets and consumption. Moreover, this research draws attention to the relevance of critical discourse analysis for and of marketing research.