Sensorial pedagogies, hungry fat cells and the limits of nutritional health education

Abstract

This article examines the way the category of ‘the sensorial' is mobilised across obesity research and care practices for overweight persons in France. The ‘natural' body is understood to have developed mechanisms that motivate eaters to seek out energy-dense foods, a hardwiring that is maladaptive in today's plethoric food environment. The article analyses the feedback models mobilised in scientific literature on the neuroendocrine processes regulating appetite. The analysis of how ‘the sensorial' is studied and used to treat patients provides a vantage point onto the ways foods and bodies transform each other. Recent findings show that fat cells influence metabolism by secreting hormones, revealing that eaters are affected by the materiality of the foods they ingest. ‘The sensorial' functions as a regulator in the feedback mechanisms where social norms regulating foodscapes become enfolded in the molecular processes that control appetite regulation. The article traces the work that the category of ‘the sensorial' does as it flows through the loops and feedbacks between scientific evidence, policy and care. It examines the way pleasure and the sensations of eaters are increasingly foregrounded in French nutritional health promotion strategies in a context where informing eaters is increasingly deemed ineffective.

Enacting community health: Obesity prevention policies as situated caring

“…The focus on diet and exercise that characterizes most obesity prevention policies, moreover, has been critiqued for overemphasizing individual choices in healthy living (Ibáñez Martín, 2018;Mol, 2013). Studies warn that the clear confidence of nutritional recommendations obscures the lack of scientific consensus on what constitutes healthy living and how body weight and lifestyle relate (Sanabria, 2015;Warin, 2014). Despite its neutral, universal tone, moreover, nutrition science incorporates cultural and material worlds that do not always fit the sites and situations where it is employed (Wrenn, 2017;Yates-Doerr, 2015).…”

Metabolism and movement: Calculating food and exercise or activating bodies in Dutch weight management

“…Like a computer, it may 'crash'. This notion of the organism is thus itself inspired by information technology and the feedback loops and signaling pathways of computer models (Sanabria, 2015).…”

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

“…I draw on materials gathered in the context of my research on alimentary health in France (Sanabria ; Sanabria and Yates‐Doerr ) and on a retrospective ethnographization (see Ingold ) of my encounters with colleagues at the WPHNA and in my (French) workplace, where I was hired to carry out anthropological research in the field of health education. This article refracts a series of global questions concerning the circulation of ignorance in the construction of evidentiary regimes of nutritional interventions through a range of materials collected in France and through my participation in global forums such as the WPHNA.…”

“…That is, they methodically elicit the irruption of what behavioral economists refer to as precognitive drives. In the cybernetic models used to think the relations between eaters and the environments in which they source foods, nutrients, fat cells, the gastrointestinal tract, brain regions, and pleasure receptors undermine eaters’ capacities to make rational choices (Sanabria ). For example, in Figure (variations of which increasingly appear in the expert meetings I attend), the environment influences metabolism through mechanisms such as availability, palatability, taste, and social habits.…”