Health Beyond the Blog: Want to Live Healthier? Take a Scroll Through Nutrition TikTok

Want to Live Healthier? Take a Scroll Through Nutrition TikTok

by Chaya Tong

When quarantine hit in March of 2020, I found myself searching for simple, healthy recipes online to fill the void left in the absence of a routine with strict mealtimes and a daily dose of exercise. While I went down an endless rabbit hole of viral TikTok recipes, the one creator I consistently relied on was nutritionist Lucie Baker (@lucie_baker on TikTok), whose simple recipes and nutritional breakdowns inspired many of my recipes at home and provided valuable insight into how to build a healthy meal. Baker posts on her account almost every day. Her content features a mix of videos of her cooking and vlogs about her daily routine as well as commentary on nutrition and lessons about skincare and building balanced meals.

I enjoy Baker’s video style and aesthetic. Unlike many TikTokers, her editing is simple with basic captions and voiceovers set to unedited cuts of her cooking. Baker connects with her audience casually, talking about everyday kinds of issues like establishing a routine or explaining why she enjoys a simple meal in her apartment. Her content also extends outside of cooking to include things like her daily commute, podcast recommendations, or videos of her walking around London, where she lives and works. The videos are calm and make the mundane things in everyday life seem interesting and worthy of documentation. Baker’s simple meal preps are easy enough that I, as a college student, can easily replicate them – making her content just as relevant to my life now as it was a few years ago during lockdown when I was in high school. She shows viewers how to build breakfast and lunch bowls while running through the nutritional facts of different ingredients and explaining why she picked each item and what its health benefits to the body are from a nutritionist’s perspective. Baker also includes sit-down videos about mental health, sharing her personal experiences with an eating disorder and her journey to finding a healthy relationship with food. By interspersing her videos about diet with thoughts on mental health, Baker encourages her viewers to think about the body as a physical and mental being, both of which need care and attention. 

Baker’s content contains a mix of photo slides and videos, making her feed visually appealing. She makes good use of TikTok’s new feature to add photos, and the diversity of form keeps me interested as I scroll through her page. I also like that her photo montages allow me to flip through her content as slowly or as quickly as I want. If I want a more in-depth experience, I can pick a video to watch. With simple, clean editing, delicious meal inspiration, and an emphasis on the ordinary, I would highly recommend Baker’s page for anyone looking to learn more about everyday nutrition.