Can parents really not know how to give food to their kids?’, a friend of mine casually shared with me. Her description of my work was deficit-based. She thought that parents reach out to me because they don’t know enough, and they need to know more.
The reality is that most of the parents I work with know too much. They know the guidelines. They know the headlines (yes, referring to that sugar rationing study). They know the importance of fruits and veggies. They know where to get their protein, whether it’s plant-based or animal-based. They know all that. And they want to know even more, including what to do when their children refuse to collaborate. Parents see me as the expert who transforms their nutrition know-how into real results, helping them not just meet their goals, but exceed them by bridging the gap between information and action.
I understand why so many parents want to excel at feeding their families. When you’ve succeeded by mastering information elsewhere, it’s natural to want to bring that same drive to the table. Most of us got somewhere in life by excelling. By controlling. By knowing the numbers game. By adopting best practices. By reading a lot. By understanding a lot. By exactly knowing what we’re doing. I know how this works because this is how I worked. As a successful health journalist and dietitian in training, I knew a lot about functional nutrition, the brain-gut axis, and superfoods. And my knowledge was growing together with my unborn baby.
Enter an unexpected twist. My pregnant body did not cooperate with what my brain decided was good for me. Every day of pregnancy, I felt sandwiched between what I crave and what the brave, better, best me should eat. I’d sell my soul – completely losing myself – to make sure my unborn baby boy was fed in the best way possible. I’d read food labels with academic precision. I’d search papers on arsenic in rice cereals – one of my pregnancy cravings. I’d walk hours to find a ready-made lasagna that fit my homemade standards. I questioned food on a loop, but thankfully, I ate it anyway.
I’m grateful I managed to eat enough during pregnancy. But in that moment, six years ago, I felt ashamed of what I was eating. I believed I needed to try harder, that it – or I – just wasn’t good enough. I felt like a failure for not being able to win with food the way I was used to. With every bite of anything that didn’t fit my healthy prototype, I swallowed the judgment of my gynecologist, my unborn baby, and, most of all, myself. Yet now I see – in the end, fed really is best.
The emotional shield called science
‘Fed is best’ is a hard truth for any educated eater to swallow. Educated eaters eat with their brains. If you’re an educated eater like I was, you want to eat by the book – not just any book, but the best one. You want the exact macro ratio.You want to optimize micronutrient intake by knowing what to eat, when to eat it, and which combinations to pair. You follow external data and take your responsibility seriously. You crave delicious food, but in your mind, it’s only good enough when it comes straight from your own kitchen.
Educated eaters like to follow exact guidelines – as long as the instructions are clear, measurable, and well-reasoned. If there’s a right way to do it, you’ll do it. Educated eaters hold an enormous amount of information in their heads, and an equally enormous amount of pressure in their bodies to get things right. The truth is, there’s more to this story than just facts and formulas. What I see, again and again, is that educated eating is not only about being brainy. It also comes from fear, which is another part of our brain trying to protect our kids. It’s the anxious voice that fears making mistakes, being judged by others, or not doing enough. It’s the voice that screams ‘If anything goes wrong, it’s your fault’.
Knowledge becomes a shield, a way to protect oneself from all the unknown factors in the world of feeding and parenting. Controlling the outcomes is the strategy that helped you succeed in school, in work, in life. And so it makes perfect sense that it finds its way into your kitchen, your dinners, your tummy. For many of us, ambition was instilled early on – and today, it shapes the way we parent and guide our children, right down to the dinner table.
Slowly, almost invisibly, when we slip into control mode, our relationship with food begins to shift. Mealtimes stop being about simply feeding our kids – they become about hitting every target. No salt or sugar before age two? Okay, it’s an absolute no-go. Family meals? You’ll find us at the table every night, even if we’re all exhausted. Daily dose of fruit or veggies? We’ll use tricks, negotiate, sneak it in, whatever it takes. These examples illustrate the drive not just to meet but to exceed every guideline, often to the point of perfectionism. Family meals need to be perfect. We need to be perfect. Our kids need to eat perfectly – even if we have to push for it. But as French philosopher Michel Foucault famously put it, ‘where there is power, there is resistance’. Nowhere is that clearer than at the dinner table, where every meal can become a battle royale.
Eating with your brain also comes with a heavy mental load. That mental load includes constant calculations, self-monitoring, and the omnipresent pressure to make the best choices for your kids, and for yourself. For every answer we find, six more uncertainties surface. This is how we get trapped by all the information we have collected – information that seems to contradict, conflict, and question itself, no matter what we do with it. ‘Don’t pressure your kids,’ but also ‘make them eat enough veggies’. I mean, how? Welcome to the messy, confusing reality of feeling stuck in a world wide web of information – where cause and consequences are blended, where headlines fuel the idea of causality, and where the ‘way out’ always comes with a price. And guess who’s cashing? Correct, diet culture.
Educated eaters as diet culture’s new ideal
Diet culture has evolved for thousands of years. Today, I notice that it aims for educated eaters with targeted precision. It no longer screams about weight loss in obvious ways. Instead, diet culture has learned to dress itself as – artificial or real – intelligence. It speaks the language of ratios, numbers, and research. It looks smart, and it tells you that you, too, must understand every nutrient and every biochemical pathway before you can trust your own instincts. As if we would need to be experts in pneumology to know how to breathe.
Underneath that message that we need to be experts before we can execute things that our bodies have done for millions of ‘unenlightened’ years – id est, eating – something more subtle arises. You begin to believe that you – and anyone else – cannot be trusted with food without constant peer-reviewed supervision or micromanagement. This version of diet culture praises external validation, while slowly separating you from your own internal signals. Maybe you learned to question your body’s signals at a very young age, making it hard to trust your body. The idea of controlling our instincts carries an undercurrent of moral superiority, often rooted in a long and painful history of classism and racism, where certain foods and bodies were labeled ‘civilized’ and others ‘undisciplined’. Today, the opposition is about ‘unaware’ and ‘educated’.
And so today, the educated eater becomes diet culture’s new ideal. With this concept, diet culture does two things. 1. It can sell its pricey, ‘easy’ solutions to help you deal with the overwhelming idea that eating well demands a good effort. And 2. It can continue to be the true racist, disowning, and disempowering concept it is, making traditional ways of eating not only unacceptable but also more and more inaccessible as more and more traditions are being broken by the spell of ‘food education’. Nobody wins, but diet culture.
Yes, our world has become complicated. Yes, reading labels helps. Yes, your family might have a dozen different needs and preferences. Yes, maybe you want to eat more plant-based food. Yes, maybe you never really learned how to cook growing up. So yes, we do need a dose of fundamental knowledge, especially about feeding ourselves, which is a different skill from eating. Some of these feeding skills are about reconnecting with what nourished families before us – cherished recipes that taste amazing and often nutritionally make a lot of sense. Other feeding skills are about learning new things, like the latest insights into eating behavior.
The way out is in
In today’s multicultural reality, finding your way means blending the old with the new. And I’m here to help you with all that. But the idea that your body can’t feed your family without encyclopedic knowledge? That idea isn’t yours. It was planted in you – a genetic crossover of diet culture and hustle culture. The way out of this intersection between dieting and hustling, in my opinion, is inwards. What if we can reconnect, become whole again, the two parts of yourself that have been separated? The head and the heart. The mind and the mouth. The jin and the yang. Whatever you want to call it. The knowledge you have gathered and the innate wisdom in your body.
Science offers context, not complication. I love nerding out on nutrition and geeking over the science. But honestly, you don’t need to know all that to feed yourself and your family well. I might be an expert in nutrition and food behavior, but you’re the expert on you and your kids. So instead of battling between heart and brain, why not start with what you want to eat? What makes you happy and satisfied at the table? What would feel good in your body right now?
That’s exactly where my support comes in. I’m here to help you overthink food less and enjoy it more, in a responsive, responsible way. When you combine your own wisdom and answers with my honest, practical guidance, food becomes genuinely easier. ‘Too easy even’, you might think. But it’s not too easy. The idea that healthy eating is complex is a side-effect of diet culture’s latest, clever disguise. And together, we’ll unmask it – not just for the sake of it, but to help you take back your dignity, money, focus, purpose, wisdom, heritage, peace, ownership, freedom, intuition, and everything else diet culture tries to deprive you of. If this sounds like what you need, I invite you to reach out to me.
© 2025 Sofie De Niet. The information in this article does not constitute personal medical advice. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a healthcare professional.
Need help?
My support is all about your child, your family, and your life. I help you raise healthy eaters from within, trusting your child’s cues, following your instincts, and making mealtimes calm and connected again. One big intake session gets us started. Then I’m in your pocket with voice-message support, effective 1-1 check-ins, and bite-sized podcasts on food refusals, tricky labels, candy, cookies, chocolate, selective eating, and mealtime stress. If you’d also like to overthink food less and enjoy it more, I invite you to book a free online clarity call with me, or send me a WhatsApp message. Of course, you can always forward this blog post to parents who need help.
