Interactive Essay June 2026

Is Nutrition Content Obesogenic?

The advice is meant to fix your eating. Watch what happens when you keep consuming it.

A question worth sitting with: what if the endless stream of nutrition content - the rules, the swaps, the things you’re doing wrong - isn’t the cure for a difficult relationship with food, but part of what keeps it difficult? Scroll on, and you feed it.

Scroll to feed it

A person sits on a sofa scrolling a phone; a tiny coral creature sits at their feet; a hot plate of food waits on the side table.

The phone has grown larger; the person leans in; the coral creature has grown and is climbing onto them.

The phone has become enormous, its screen an opening; the person is being swallowed head-first; the coral creature looms over their back.

The whole room is now inside a phone screen, walled by an endless feed; the person sits inside still scrolling another phone.

The phone is back to normal, set down on the cushion; the person reaches for the plate; the coral creature has shrunk back to tiny.

The feed · 1 / 5 It starts harmlessly. A few minutes on the phone. Something about food, probably - a swap, a rule, a thing you’re apparently doing wrong.

Notice what the scrolling did. The more you fed it, the more of the person it took - until the room itself was inside the phone and the meal had gone cold on the table. None of that was hunger. It was consumption of a different kind, dressed up as taking care of yourself.

The content about food doesn’t feed you. Past a point, it eats you - and the only way out isn’t more of it. It’s less.

(Draft - the closing argument and every line above are placeholder copy for Charlie to rewrite in his voice. The open question of whether to let the piece name itself as nutrition content too is still to decide.)

Charlie Beestone · CB Nutrition

A prototype interactive essay - draft copy. The mechanic is the point: your scroll is the consumption, and the consumption is the argument.