Healthy living guidelines and the disconnect with everyday life

In Western democracies, citizens are advised by governments to manage their bodily practices in highly specific ways. There are guidelines for healthy eating, alcohol consumption, exercise and screen time. However, most research works suggest that there is a substantial gap between the guidelines and the ways in which most people live their lives. How can we make sense of this disconnect between the guidelines and everyday life? In this article, I discuss Australian healthy eating and healthy drinking guidelines. I argue that the guidelines invite us to manage our bodies in an idealised, individualised world where lifestyle change is a straightforward matter of putting knowledge into practice. Instead, we inhabit complex social worlds where food and alcohol are central to social life, and the enactment of our social identities and key social practices. Citizens do actively manage their food and alcohol consumption in an effort to be healthy, but they do so from a context where ‘social well-being’ is the primary aim. On the basis of current public health practice, it seems the guidelines will remain central to public health knowledge and funding claims but increasingly disconnected and irrelevant to citizens who inhabit contextualised social worlds.