[Dietetics and the health and fitness cult. The risks of dietetics in the Welfare State].

We shall analyse the reasons why various matters related to diet have become a type of a purification ritual in the welfare society. In order to explain this circumstance three historic moments in the use of diet shall be studied: a) Diet as an explicit means in the care of the soul. Besides its function in the care of the body, diet was used in ancient times as a specific remedy to improve both the psychic and moral aspects of the mental faculties. b) Diet as an implicit remedy in moral well-being. From the Renaissance onwards diet no longer had this explicit function in curing the soul, however it tacitly retained a certain effect on the moral factors. c) Diet as an instrument of the health and fitness cult. Despite the scientific configuration of dietetics in the second half of the nineteenth century, old function of diet remained mutatis mutandis with regards to the moral sphere of the subject. Factors such as the development of how thinness or fatness was viewed at this time and the resulting explosion of interest in controlling body-weight, which acquired characteristics of pseudo-religious activity, may explain this fact. In this way the old idea of "you are what you eat" coexists with the more modern one of "you eat what you are".