Food Substitutes, Health Supplements and the Geist of Fitness

Abstract

Commodity fixation generated by contemporary market cultures and consumer practices in capital expenditure is deeply contingent upon simulated realities disseminated through television and other means of advertisement. These may be understood as antecedents to age-specific lifestyles and consumption habits underlying consumer concerns in “product value”. Such mediations upon value, incessant and almost seamless, also produce a new kind of consumer who is smart and aware of product choices but in whom the need for consumption has, for the most, been carefully manufactured by market forces. In rethinking the role of food substitutes and health supplements in bolstering the contemporary discourse of fitness, this paper will comment upon the ontology of consumption patterns within commodity cultures. It will consider marketing strategies of these products and locate consumer practices around the same in the interrelated flux of gyms, spas and fitness centres. In doing so, it will provide a comprehensive study of the health preoccupations of a largely bourgeois consumer base, a class which has to negotiate the baffling proliferation of consumer-based “organic”/“zero cholesterol”/“no trans-fats”, etc., food products to decide “what’s on the table” every day. It will then conclude with comments on the position of the consumer with reference to medico-nutritional needs being facilitated primarily through compulsive consumption as integral to good health and fitness.