Promoting health: Producing moralisms?

Based on an ethnographic study of 34 Danish consumers, the aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it presents discourses of health promotion in a public and commercial domain. Secondly, it presents a typology of discourses that are employed by consumers in their social construction of healthy food and addresses the moralism, which consumers attach to food and health. The overall argument is that under the pretext of promoting health the dominant public discourse on health actually contributes to the creation of new moralities in consumers’ discourses and to the production of anxiety and social stigma in certain parts of the population.