Heart Disease and Cancer, Diet and Exercise, Vitamins and Minerals: The Construction of Lifestyle Risks in Popular Health Discourse

Abstract

This article proposes a conceptual framework for analysing the discursive construction of lifestyle risks in health.  This framework suggests that a preoccupation with the negative (= negativization), and with individuals, their choices and responsibilities (= personalization and individualization) combined with an aura of science (= scientification) will introduce lifestyle risks as a perspective to any discourse, particularly discourses concerned with health.  It is further argued that this connection might lead to a view of health and diseases that foregrounds medical aspects and individual responsibility at the cost of social aspects and political responsibilities.  The article tries to demonstrate how the framework can be translated into concrete research, starting from a Critical Discourse Analytical perspective and using corpus analytical tools.  The data examined is a corpus of sixteen books giving advice on how to avoid cardiovascular disease.  The contribution firstly shows how the analysis of keywords and elements of deontic modality can be interpreted with respect to the conceptual categories of the framework, and secondly how these categories might also lead to very concrete research foci such as the frequency of cardinals and lexemes for measuring units or the frequency and the lexical variation of lexemes for pathological conditions.