The season is here.

Popsicle season is coming, and apparently so is the guilt. My feed is full of "no sugar, no preservatives, no guilt" everything. Frozen fruit bars. Homemade ice cream kits. Influencers blending their own coconut milk popsicles with one hand while their unbleached 100% cotton-linen blend apron stays inexplicably clean.

The "no guilt" part is what gets me - not the confidence of the assumption but what it’s hiding. That I'm standing here, freezer aisle, fruit popsicle in hand, quietly ashamed.

I'm not. But I notice that I'm supposed to be.

The food processing industry spent decades engineering products designed for shelf life, not health - high sodium, high sugar, high fat, built to last and built to sell. There is real evidence that a diet heavy in ultra-processed food carries long-term health consequences, and the concern is legitimate. 

What followed that evidence is where things get interesting.

Instead of pressure landing on the manufacturers who engineered the food supply this way, it got redirected. Onto the parent, and let's be honest, it lands on the mom far more than anyone else. Dad guilt exists, but the world has a particular appetite for making mothers feel like they're falling short (that's a whole other essay.) 

The wellness industry saw the anxiety this created and built an entire economy on top of it. "Clean" alternatives, guilt-free versions, better options for the parent who cares enough to try.

This misdirection has an interesting history. 

In 1929, Edward Bernays was hired to sell more bacon. He didn't run a single ad or make a single claim about bacon. He commissioned a study asking physicians whether Americans would be healthier eating a heavier breakfast. The doctors said yes. Bernays published the findings everywhere, with bacon and eggs as the obvious example. Breakfast culture changed. Bacon sales exploded. Nobody knew he'd been involved.

The infamous research paper published in the 1960s that “demonstrated” dietary fat as the driver of heart disease was funded by…the sugar industry, in an attempt to shift attention away from sugar. The product changed. The scrutiny didn't follow it. What followed was a decades-long story about individual choices, personal responsibility, and the parent's grocery cart. The problem was manufactured. The solution was sold back at a markup, and the people who made the problem largely stayed out of frame.

The parent carrying all of this is also working, managing a household, holding a mental load that doesn't show up on any job description. Sometimes McDonald's is dinner because it is the only dinner available on that particular Tuesday. Sometimes the fruit popsicle wins because the alternative is nothing. Framing her choices as the cause isn't a health intervention. It's a misdirection, and it's inappropriate.

This pattern shows up somewhere else entirely. Content creators contort themselves to satisfy an algorithm they didn't write, chasing reach inside a system someone else built and someone else profits from. 

The platform creates the conditions. Engagement drops, visibility shrinks, and the creator is told the answer is more consistency, better hooks, a more optimized version of themselves - or conveniently, to try this new content creation method that the platform just happened to build an app for, available for download now.

As a Naturopathic Doctor, I may be breaking a few stereotypes here - my field isn't exactly known for defending the occasional McDonald's run. But if some of my patients are reading this, you probably aren't surprised. You know my approach. Sugar is not poison and fear mongering is its own kind of harm. A popsicle is not a moral failing. 

The wellness influencer selling you a "no guilt" recipe has a business model. The food brand with "clean" on the label has a margin to protect. The platform telling you to post more consistently has your attention to monetize. 

My point? Go ahead and buy the coconut milk popsicle ingredients if that's what you want - I'm not judging you, and honestly, sometimes I do too. Just try to know why you're doing it and who sold you the feeling that you needed to in the first place. There's a difference between a choice and a choice that was made for you.