Young people’s accounts of smoking, exercising, eating and drinking alcohol: being cool or being unhealthy?

This paper reports the findings of a study that explores how young people talk about smoking, eating, drinking alcohol and exercise in the context of their everyday lives. The study was motivated by recognizing the difficulties, within the field of health promotion, in recording the ‘everyday’ character of smoking, eating, drinking alcohol and exercise. The classification of these four behaviours as health-related overlooks their ‘everyday’ cultural meanings. Theories of consumer culture as an interpretive approach to contemporary life are found to represent alternative ways of understanding young people’s ‘health’ behaviours. Using information gathered from open-ended interviews with a sample of young people in Cyprus, a variety of processes are delineated in order to reveal the multidimensional phenomenon of people’s private accounts of ‘health’ behaviours. The findings reported here show how young people invest meanings in ‘health’ choices, which are closely related to the everyday contexts of consumption. What young people consume, and their representations of what they consume, are not only about health consciousness, but also about self-image, socialization and an active stylization of life. This is not to suggest that health consciousness is irrelevant to young people’s choices but such choices receive other meanings within consumer culture.