Diet culture is toxic

Question

https://ucsdguardian.org/2021/05/16/the-distasteful-truth-about-diet-culture/

Diet culture surrounds media and society, so much so that people don't only allow diets to affect them physically, but also mentally.

Comments

While I do believe that the statement you are making is true, maybe next time using a source that is not an opinion piece could make it a little more credible and give you more to speak on.

Answer 1

While I do believe it is worthwhile to explore the link between the prevalence of diet culture and adverse psychological effects, the source you've linked is opinion-based and therefore cannot be verifiably fact-checked. The publication, the UCSD Guardian, is the University of California, San Diego’s student newspaper, as described on the "About Us" page. This and other student publications are not reliable sources for medical information, including about the mental health effects of societal phenomena such as diet culture. That being said, the UCSD Guardian opinion piece does link to a few medically reliable sources, including a National Library of Medicine article on "metabolically healthy obesity" and a clinical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics on obesity and eating disorder prevention in adolescents. These may be better sources from which to determine your claim's truthfulness, as they are peer-reviewed, medical reports rather than opinion pieces in student publications.

Secondly, the language of your claim itself may prove problematic in ascertaining its truthfulness. The assertion that diet culture is "toxic" isn't able to be definitively proven because it is an opinion-based statement. You may consider rewording your claim to something more substantive, such as "Diet culture has adverse psychological effects on society."

Comments

This is a great point. Creating an opposing argument by identifying the basis of this claim is smart. It creates a kind of argument that the statement is left open for more investigation but also blocks out certain claims that are followed by opinions, leaving little left to back it up.

In addition, calling out the sources used and identifying them as non reliable is also a good way to justify the opposing side.

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I appreciate this fact check. You were able to find better, unbiased sources to help back up this claim and gave a detailed critique on why the original source did not handle this claim in the way it originally should've.