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Abstract
<p class="first" id="d10990793e69">What constitutes healthy eating is experiencing
ongoing public debate, and this debate
is increasingly taking place on the Internet. In this article, using a dialectical
approach to analyse rhetorical discourse, we investigated how six highly popular Finnish
nutrition counselling bloggers construct dietetic credibility and understanding. Their
argumentation is compared to that of two academic experts contributing to the blog
of the National Institute for Health and Welfare. Theoretically, we draw on Michael
Billig's notions on how thinking and understanding are pervasively argumentative and
reflect wider socio-cultural contexts, and on the dilemmatic nature of common sense.
We demonstrate how the popular Finnish nutrition counselling bloggers rhetorically
constructed a more particularistic and individualistic understanding of healthy eating
in their argumentation in critical opposition to the universalistic and population-based
understanding. In the popular Finnish nutrition counselling bloggers argumentation,
practical, subjective and moral knowledge was valued, alongside abstract, scientific
knowledge. In contrast, the National Institute for Health and Welfare bloggers typically
utilised population-based averages and causalities in their argumentation. We argue
that arguing over healthy eating in the public domain is fundamentally an epistemic
struggle, in which different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing are valued, and
dilemmas related to healthy eating are deliberated.
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