211. Decolonizing Health and Nutrition with Dalina Soto
Health and Nutrition Without Binaries
Diet culture is everywhere.
What we consider healthy. What we consider unhealthy. The foods that we’re taught are good for us and the ones that we’re told to stay away from. How we think about food, health, and wellness is shaped by a culture steeped in white supremacy culture.
Dalina Soto, MA, RDN, LDN joins Erica for a conversation about diet and wellness culture, why ancestral and cultural foods too often get left out of the conversation, and the policy and systemic influences on what we think of as “healthy” food.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
Why we need to expand binary thinking about nutrition and health
How nutritional guidelines in the US leave out large swaths of cultural and ancestral foods
The impacts of stress and other social determinants of health on the body, and why that’s a policy failure not a personal one
Taking guilt and shame out of doing what you can with what you have when it comes to food
Food, Flavor, and Culture without Guilt
Dalina Soto, MA, RD, LDN, is a Latina and bilingual Registered Dietitian who celebrates eating cultural foods without guilt. Having grown up in a Dominican family, she strives to support and inspire others to build nourishing new narratives that don't include depriving oneself of the foods that connect us to our culture.
Through her outspoken advocacy on social media and educational content, Dalina has garnered a strong community of over 250,000 followers and now uses her platforms to actively teach the importance of reclaiming the flavors and foods we love, (like white rice!) while educating on how to better incorporate them into our daily lives with empowerment and awareness. Dalina has spoken across the country on this topic, has partnered with various advocacy groups to co-create campaigns in support of these efforts and most recently was invited to The White House to share her insight with key policy makers. Dalina also teaches Nutrition and Culture at West Chester University.
A Philadelphia resident, Dalina received her Bachelor's Degree in Nutritional Sciences from PennState University and her Masters Degree in Nutrition Education from Immaculata University.
Decolonizing Nutrition and Wellness
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Erica Courdae (she/her) says that she initially came across Dalina Soto’s (she/her) work on diet, nutrition, and wellness on Instagram.
Erica says that she appreciates the way that Dalina shows up on her platform in a way that is supportive to “Latinas that honestly don’t get that when it comes to nutrition.” She adds that for her as a Black woman, Dalina’s work still speaks to her because so much of wellness and nutrition is steeped in white supremacy culture.
Dalina says that when people first learn that she is a registered dietician, they often assume that she will “police what I eat, you’re going to bully me into eating all these foods I don’t like, and you’re going to ask me to lose weight…I do not do any of those things.”
She says that if those are your goals, she is not the dietician for you.
Erica adds that Dalina’s approach felt so different and supportive to her because there is no focus on body size. She mentions working with a trainer years ago and sharing a photo of herself from when she was 19 as an example of what she didn’t want to look like, and having the trainer ask “why not?” because in the photo Erica was thin.
“Too often Black and Brown bodies don’t have ownership of their own narratives around their bodies as a whole, let alone what I put in it and what shape it needs to be in or what I am or am not happy with when it comes to it.”
Dalina says it takes a lot of self-awareness to have that realization and that “one of the things that is so hard when you’re on a journey of undoing or decolonizing a lot of what we’ve learned about health and body and food, it’s really tough to come to terms with that and have that self-awareness of like, oh shit, none of this was ever created for me. It was created for white people.”
Beyond the Healthy/Unhealthy Binary
Dalina recalls a recent conversation with a friend that helped her put words to her approach to nutrition. Her friend commented that there are “smart” people who view the world with a binary lens and “intellectual” people who view the world through the “in-between” with a lot more nuance.
She says it came up in relation to a discussion about the existence of aliens, and that “smart” people need tangible proof of something before they’ll believe it and “intellectual” people are willing to accept that it’s possible because we can’t be certain either way.
She applies that framework to her thinking about diet culture and food in that some people have read the books, they’ve taken the courses, and “that is the only thing that they can see. They can’t see the connections, the ligaments, all of the things inside that created that, because they’re just so far removed from the middle parts and they’re just looking at the ends.”
She continues, “And then we think about bodies, why is it that we have to think that only skinny is healthy and fat cannot be healthy?...People come in all different shapes and sizes and to 5hear and say that there’s only one way to be healthy? How does that even make sense?”
Dalina clarifies that she uses the word “fat” as a descriptor, based on the work of fat liberationists to reclaim the word from its negative connotations.
Erica agrees that thinking there is only one way to be healthy doesn’t make sense, in part simply because not all bodies respond to all foods the exact same way.
Dalina notes that it’s also important to acknowledge that not everyone will be healthy.
“It’s important to understand that when people think of healthy, they think of it as a moral thing. As in, people owe me and you health. They don’t. What we owe them, or what I owe them as a healthcare professional, is dignity and respect. That is the difference. It doesn’t matter what size they are. My job as a healthcare provider, our job as a society, is to treat people with dignity and respect. It doesn’t matter whether they’re healthy or not. It doesn’t matter their size. We need to help them find what health means to them.”
Nutritional Guidelines and Cultural Foods
Erica says that she is reminded of conversations she’s had recently about the difference between acceptance and approval.
“I didn’t ask you to approve of me. I didn’t ask you to give me your blessing and to say that I have the right to exist. That’s not up to you to take away.”
And that approval or disapproval framing gets applied to food as well, particularly around cultural or ancestral foods.
Dalina says that her whole education was based on “the American way,” throughout public school and a state university, “but what we don’t realize is that the United States has created their own set of guidelines when it comes to nutrition, just like every other country in the world has, but for some reason we are hell-bent on saying that there is only one way of eating in a country that is so diverse.”
When the average person takes in those guidelines, they are only presented with one way of eating. As a dietician, Dalina can review those guidelines from a scientific view of what nutrients the body needs and what foods can provide them, but those basic lists are not going to include indigenous foods, ancestral foods, or cultural foods that you grew up with.
“They made these guidelines based on what they assumed Americans were eating. And who did they consider American?”
And while Dalina says that she believes in the guidelines in the sense of getting a balance of necessary nutrients and macros, “what I don’t believe in is how they just narrow us to certain foods that they believe are good.”
One example of this is white rice.
Dalina says that the global majority eats white rice. And whenever she’s put out the question on any of her social media platforms asking “what culture do you know eats brown rice as a cultural dish,” no one can answer.
“Nobody actually uses brown rice and that’s because brown rice is actually white rice with bran on it. That’s it…We take that layer off because it’s easier to digest. It holds flavor better. It’s easier to cook. But it doesn’t mean that it’s worse for you.”
She says that even the US recommendations only say that 50% of your grain intake should be whole grains, but people get stuck on the idea that everything needs to be whole grain.
This is apparent also in the way that people push the “Mediterranean Diet” as the best way to eat, but leave out the traditional foods of North African countries that border the Mediterranean and ignore that even the European Mediterranean countries will also be eating white rice.
“I’ve been told that there’s dishes in Asia that mix white and brown rice, but there isn’t any dish that someone can say, yeah, I grew up eating only brown rice, unless you’re American.”
Stress, Inflammation, Undereating
Erica adds that the conversation around white rice and whole grains doesn’t account for “the individuality of what my body is going to do with something, and where inflammation would show up, where stress would show up, how things like hypertension might show up because of nutrition, because of lack of information around it. It never took into consideration, hey, I’m a Black woman and you’re a white man, you might not have the same thing happen to your body that I do.”
The advice for so many becomes simply, you need to lose weight, or you eat too much rice, or this or that. “Y’all just setting me up for failure.”
Dalina takes a moment to clarify that in the medical setting, inflammation is not a disease, it is related to an overproduction of cortisol, often related to chronic stress, that is impacting the organs.
Erica notes that she has Crohn’s disease, which Dalina explains is a chronic autoimmune inflammatory condition, that is very different from the way that “inflammation” gets presented on social media with admonishments to cut out dairy, gluten, etc. to get rid of inflammation.
“Basically just take in the air. Air and water. And then you’re wondering, why do I feel like shit? Why am I not feeling better? Because that’s causing more inflammation. When you’re undernourished, you’re causing inflammation.”
Dalina explains that undereating puts the body in a state of chronic stress and adds, “Do you know how much privilege you have to have to purposely starve yourself? Because there are people in this world who don’t have the luxury to eat. And there are people out here purposely starving themselves in the name of health.”
That also brings social determinants of health and the chronic stress created by food insecurity and other micro-stressors that impact health. “When we’re talking about Black and Brown communities, and we’re talking about health, we need to talk about the fact that it’s not the same.”
She illustrates that point by noting that where she in in Philadelphia, where the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, city hall workers who make minimum wage work nearby to an organic grocery store, where the produce could cost more than they make in an hour.
“That worker has to work two, three hours before they can afford blueberries, but they can go across the street to Wendy’s and get a whole-ass meal for ten dollars. So don’t sit there and tell me that people are making themselves sick because of the food that they’re eating. No, the systems in this country are making people sick.”
Doing What You Can with What You Have
Erica agrees about the impacts of micro-stressors constantly adding up. She and Dalina joke that it’s like DJ Khaled’s “anotha one” as they pop up and compound on each other.
Erica remembers reading Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism, and the section discussing banning soda in schools and how there was so much focus on the sugar in soda, but no one involved in the policy-making brought up the amount of sugar in a Starbucks Frappuccino.
“I remember when it happened and I was like, oh, that seems like it should be a good thing, and then when I read that, I was like, oh well, shit. That’s not a good thing.”
That also applies to people feeling shame that they might have relied on soda or juice when there have been issues with their water supply. “I’m doing the best I can with what I have access to. With what you decided I could have access to.”
Dalina adds, “And then you’d want to talk about healthcare costs. Your fault. Not ours.”
She continues that she has parents in her office who are afraid to give their kids milk or other conventional foods because there’s so much information about them and demonization of them.
“I love myself an oat milk latte…but when you are struggling and you can buy a gallon of milk for $4.25, you can give your kid 7 grams, 8 grams of protein, you can give them fat, you can give them carbohydrates…”
She acknowledges that US agriculture policy contributes to a lot of the pushback on milk and that 60-70% of people are lactose intolerant, “But what I’m saying is why are you shaming someone for doing what they can with what they have?”
“There is a place where we can all eat and live the way that we deem okay for ourselves without shaming and guilting the other person.”
Bringing Back Your Cultural Foods
Erica says “Part of that is us having to reclaim that we have to make these decisions for ourselves because clearly we can’t trust the masses to do it for us…And if you are addressing what happened to be ancestral or cultural foods…there is the place of you having to take self-permission to actually eat those foods, but to actually sometimes do the research.”
Dalina adds that if you don’t know what your ancestry is, you are free to make your own new traditions.
“It’s disheartening because a lot of people do want to go back. They want to go back to the way that we ate, in an ancestral way. But the information that’s out there isn’t always correct. And also, our ancestors were doing what they could with what they had as well. And now we have modern technology so things might be a little different, and that’s all right. I think that it does take a little discernment to figure it out. Like, if it’s too extreme, if it feels too binary, it’s probably not it.”
Erica adds, “If you’re taking in traditional information, you do have to use that discernment….It does tap into that place of that individual permission-giving of trust your own intuition and body to tell you what your truth is and not always seek somebody else to validate it for you.”
Dalina agrees that you can’t eat everything your ancestors did and you have to do what works for you. And she adds that we can also learn from and enjoy other cultures’ methods and seasonings, etc.
On seasonings, she cites the book, Fearing the Black Body, by Dr. Sabrina Strings which includes a brief history of how spices were imported to Europe and why white people stereotypically don’t season their food.
Because they were difficult and expensive to import, spices were typically used by wealthy Europeans, but as imports became less laborious and expensive and spices became more accessible to lower classes, the wealthy “started using things like being more natural, being closer to its original form, having less flavor, so that they could differentiate themselves from the lower classes.”
She continues, “And we see that a lot in the wellness world now. How do people stay elite? By doing things that the commoners don’t want to do or can’t afford to do.”
In US history, the invention of cereal and graham crackers is tied to white supremacy and religious beliefs about purity. “They believed that having bland food helped you undo impure thoughts. So they developed a bland food diet in order for you to be more pure. But to them, purity was for the white woman, so that they could procreate and create the perfect race.”
What Can You Add?
In summing up her nutrition philosophy, Dalina says, “I always say, instead of taking away, add…You can always add nutrition. And that’s what I want you to think about like, how can I add nutrition to this? And when I say add nutrition, make sure it tastes good. I don’t want you to just add kale because you think it belongs. If it don’t belong there, don’t add it. Add it because it tastes good.”
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Connect with Dalina Soto, MA, RD, LDN:
Instagram: @your.latina.nutritionist
TikTok: @yourlatinanutritionist