To Örebro University

This paper explores the early marketing practices (1910–1940) of the Swedish cough drop brand Läkerol, demonstrating how it capitalised on the ‘spaces of confusion’ posed by the product’s liminality between food and medicine to create a slick marketing campaign inspired by the tried-and-tested formulas of the food industry. Advertisements used a range of strategies, such as expert and role model testimonials, humorous and serious newsjacking and the introduction of a friend-physician brand mascot to extend Läkerol from a cold remedy to an everyday product necessary for fun and excitement. By telling consumers not just about its benefits, but also connoting that it was part of a contemporary way of living, Läkerol was able to incorporate itself into a daily consumerist lifestyle, growing into a trendy and popular brand consumed daily by Swedes as part of a ritualised practice.

This book sets out to historicise our understanding of contemporary trends by studying the long relationship between science, food and drink marketing and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. It aims to bring together contemporary and historical research from a multimodal perspective, considering how scientific discourse and ideas about health and nutrition are channelled through visual and material culture. Using examples of advertisements, commercials and posters, the 16 chapters in this book will foster a cross-disciplinary and cross-temporal dialogue, uncovering links between past and present ways that manufacturers have capitalised upon scientific innovations to create new products or rebrand existing products and employed science to make claims about health and nutrition. They will, thus, demonstrate the continuity of science in food and drink marketing—even if fundamental ideas of nutrition have evolved over time. The book provides crucial new insights into the significance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period of innovation in food and drink marketing and showcasing how many of the marketing strategies employed today, in fact, have a far broader historical trajectory. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Critical Food Studies, Media and Communication Studies, History of Science and Medicine and Cultural Studies, as well as nutritionists, dieticians, sportspeople, in addition to policymakers and practitioners working in the area of food and drink marketing.

In this chapter, we present a brief overview of major developments in the field of nutrition science over the past 150 years as a means of contextualising the 13 core chapters that make up Food Marketing and Selling Healthy Lifestyles with Science. Demonstrating how understandings around what we eat and how it affects our bodies have evolved from the late nineteenth century to modern day provides a framework for much of the discussion that follows in terms of how scientific claims are used in food marketing. Across the volume, we see how food advertisements are reflective not only of the social and cultural zeitgeist but are also strongly linked to nutritional and dietetic understanding. We begin this chapter by briefly exploring the concept of nutrition in the Ancient World and throughout the centuries that followed until the Chemical Revolution of the late 1700s when the foundations were laid for modern nutrition science. Our focus then shifts to key nutritional research conducted throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which ultimately led to the identification of individual micronutrients. Finally, we outline how the now well-established field of nutrition science has continued to develop over the past century and the state of the research area today. © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Lauren Alex O’Hagan and Göran Eriksson; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.

This chapter sets out the key aims and focus of the edited volume, arguing that the use of scientific discourse in food marketing has a long history dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing upon key examples from the authors’ many years of research in the area, it outlines why it is necessary to study this topic from both a transhistorical and multimodal perspective and the important insights that this can offer into contemporary food marketing. The chapter also underscores four key themes that run across the 13 chapters that make up the volume—scientific motherhood; the paradoxical blend of science with tradition and/or nature; hygiene and cleanliness in relation to food safety and health values; and healthism and the medicalisation of everyday life—as well as key studies to have been carried out in these important areas of research. It ends by appealing for further dialogue and transhistorical, multimodal studies in order to enrich our understanding of the link between science, food marketing and healthy lifestyles.

In the present time, we see a rapid development of so-called cosmetic apps promoted by prominent cosmetic companies. Although there is an emerging market for male consumers, these apps are marketed as technological innovations designed to analyse, rate and evaluate mainly women’s facial appearances through the submission of a selfie. Based on the results generated from the selfie, personalised solutions are offered in the form of recommended products to supposedly help women improve their appearances. Drawing on a critical feminist approach and using multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), the aim of this article is to study how these evaluations are semiotically reproduced and presented to the users. The paper examines in detail how apps convey the evaluation process and transform a selfie into measures, presented through diagrams and charts, that is, how the female face is fragmented and metricised. Coming with affordances of being systematic, exact and scientific, these infographics assign the facial evaluations with meaning. A key argument is that these cosmetic apps are changing the way women are implied to consider and control their (facial) appearance. Following neoliberal notions, the apps put strong pressure on women to take the responsibility to engage in intensive forms of aesthetic labour and to consume the ‘right’ products to appear as the best versions of themselves.

This paper examines the marketing of trending green cosmetic products containing natural ingredients and coming with claims to keep skin health-enhancing and age-defying benefits. This is fostered by the growing importance of successful ageing and the neoliberal self-care agenda. Adopting the notion of "integrated design" from Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this paper looks at the communicative affordances of the web and how marketers of "green" cosmetics connect these to science. The analysis shows that the integrated design of the webpages allows cosmetic companies to connote science while glossing over significant details, leaving causalities, classifications, and processes unspecified. This marketing frames fighting the "look" of ageing as a moral and ethical consumption choice. Such choices relate to self-care regimes of a "successful" neoliberal citizenship.

Riding on the rising concern of public health and the growing neoliberal self-care agenda, the food market has witnessed a surge in ‘healthy’ food despite the criticism of this food does not help consumers eat more healthily. A growing interest in CriticalDiscourse Studies (CDS) is how food marketers colonise not only the food discourse but also the broader ideas and values such as health, politics, and environment. Contributing to this growing body of research, we look at one of the fastest-growing food trends, ‘functional drinks’, which claim to target physiological and psychological processes in the body, so that consumers can manage their health and performance. Company websites rely on forms of infographics to communicate how the products work. Adopting the notion of ‘integrated design’ from multimodal CDS, we show how these infographics, drawing on their affordancesare particularly useful in symbolising classifications and causalities which could not be accounted for in running texts. The paper argues that this is a way health and science converge with a neoliberal discourse of self-management and enterprise culture. Given the increased use of forms of integrated design incommunication, more critical discursive work is needed in this area.

This paper offers the first case study of the marketing of codliver oil in Sweden (1920–1930), following the discovery of vitamins A and D. Drawing upon a large dataset of cod liveroil advertisements from the Swedish Newspaper Archive, it uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to investigate how language and other semiotic resources (e.g. image, typography, color) work together to convey the benefits of cod liver oil intake. It identifies three overarching themes—scientific rationality, scientific motherhood, and nature—noting how advertisements were aimed squarely at mothers and struck a balancebetween vitamins as scientifically formulated products and mythical, natural substances to convince them that cod liveroil was necessary for their children. Exploring how cod liver oil was marketed from a historical perspective shows how nutritional research gained prominence and became of increasing importance for marketing, as well as how food, through science, became incorporated into a consumerist lifestyle. It also provides a way to deconstruct contemporary marketing practices, thereby enabling consumers to rethink products framed as indispensable for their health.

Taking off from the theory of social semiotics and using the methods of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how the communicative affordances of a Swedish reality makeover show, The Great Health Journey, are used to promote discourses normalizing extreme fitness ideals. It is a show that reduces health to body fitness and supports a particular health consciousness gaining prominence today, an ideology here depicted as fitnessism. Progressing the ideas put forward by Crawford (1980, Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life. International Journal of Health Services, 10(3), 365-388; Crawford, 2006. Health as a meaningful social practice. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 10(4), 401-420) with the notion of healthism, fitnessism accentuates the careful submission to strict fitness-related regimes as crucial for a healthy lifestyle. It turns the very fit body into a sign of good morals, indicating the values of self-discipline, self-control, and willpower, personal characteristics seen as crucial in the neoliberal era. But the healthiness of this fitness ideal can be questioned. Rather than serving the interest of public health, fitnessism seems to mainly encourage "aesthetic labour" (Elias et al., 2017. Aesthetic labour: Rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan) and support commercial interests to exploit body dissatisfaction.

This study analyzes how men's domestic cooking is represented and masculinized in cookbooks, written by men for men and published in 1975, 1992, and 2010, respectively. Departing from the concept of domestic masculinities, it uses the methods of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. It asks: what kind of values and ideas connected to men, food, and the home are realized in texts and images? And how are these legitimized and naturalized? As the study's context is Sweden, a country known for its pursuit of gender equality, the study focuses on how men's domestic cooking has been represented in cookbooks published roughly 20 years apart. The analysis shows that, while the first two books are characterized by a 'real man' discourse and working-class masculinity, the 2010 book represents a masculinity in line with a 'new man image' closely linked to consumption and materiality. However, structurally, there are few differences. Values associated with traditional middle-class masculinities, traditional gender norms, and gendered division of domestic labor are reproduced. Men's cooking is recontextualized as a playful leisure activity. In all three books, cooking becomes another way for a man to appear successful - both in relation to other men and women, and in socioeconomic terms.