To Örebro University

This study uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore the growing market of mental health applications (MHapps), particularly those using sound and music to promote wellbeing. Focusing on NuCalm, Endel and BrainTap, it examines the design and functionalities of their interfaces, revealing the underlying assumptions, values and ideologies embedded in their structures. It finds that these apps are structured around a script of self-management and self-improvement, deeply embedded in an entrepreneurial discourse of self-optimisation. What initially appears as a focus on wellbeing, in fact, subtly pushes users to maximise productivity and competitiveness. The study also reveals paradoxes in presenting both technology and users as the problem and solution to mental health challenges. Overall, it provides new insights into how MHapps shape contemporary understandings of wellbeing, reinforcing neoliberal ideologies of self-care as individual responsibility and raising broader questions about whether these technologies help users or simply redefine personal struggles as failures.

In the context of the rising emphasis on health and healthy dieting in China,this article focuses on the booming market of functional drinks. The globalmarket for such drinks has grown steadily and currently big internationalproducers as well as local companies make huge investments in this field.The study concentrates on how functional drinks are promoted through theirpackaging design to appeal to Chinese consumers. Using the analyticaltools of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), the analysis aims toreveal how notions of health and healthy ways of life are embedded in suchmundane items. The data include two subcategories of functional drinks:vitamin/hydration drinks and health-improving drinks. Five of the most populardrinks were chosen from each category. The analysis shows that drinksare promoted as a form of ‘wonder drinks’ appealing to the aspirations ofthe rising Chinese middle class. Although the bottles have their obviouslocal design features, they are underpinned by the Western ideologies ofnutritionism and the more self-centred morality of healthism, which contrastswith traditional Chinese values.

Grounded in the Social Semiotic theory of communication and employing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as its methodological framework, this paper examines the hashtag #beautyfilters to explore how women engage discursively with beauty ideals through their online self-presentations. Beauty filters enable users to manipulate and digitally enhance their own images, shaping how they perceive and construct the self. The data consist of 67 TikTok videos collected during May 2023. From this material, we identified three broad thematic categories: Creating the “perfect” face through filters; beauty tutorials and the “digital-forensic gaze”; and authenticity in self-presentation. The findings suggest that beauty filters intensify a digital-forensic gaze directed at women’s appearances. This gaze compels women to compare their own looks not only to those of others but also with idealized, filter-generated versions of themselves. This pursuit of perfection, sustained by a neoliberal, self-objectifying gaze, encourages women to internalize narrow beauty norms and to perceive their natural appearances as inherently “not good enough.”

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. 

This paper historicizes the contemporary meat substitutes trend by analyzing advertisements from the Sanitas Nut Food Company, founded by Dr John Harvey Kellogg, during its first five years of operation (1896-1901). Using visual social semiotics, it explores the rhetorical and multimodal strategies used in the advertisements, finding that Sanitas marketed its meat substitute products by drawing upon four meat myths-normal, natural, necessary, and nice-often using shockvertising to promote dietary change. However, by focusing on meat's taste, flavor, appearance, and nutritional benefits, Sanitas unintentionally perpetuated meat's superiority, undermining the significance of meat substitutes in their own right. Today, the persistence of similar strategies, though adapted to reflect contemporary societal values, highlights the need for marketing that prioritizes consumer education and animal agriculture issues. These findings emphasize the enduring influence of certain ways of shaping "eating knowledge" around meat and our material interactions with food.