One of the most common questions I am asked as a nutritionist specialising in queer health is: 'Why do LGBTQIA+ people need a different approach to nutrition?' It is a reasonable question, but it is not always asked with genuine curiosity or intellectual humility.
More often, it comes with a dismissive certainty, as though nutrition begins and ends with calories and macros, without considering the complex relationship between food, physiology, mental health and the everyday realities of LGBTQ+ lives.
What many people do not recognise is that mainstream wellness is largely designed around a presumed heterosexual, cisgender, neurotypical and able-bodied consumer.
Familiar instructions to eat more healthily, exercise more, get eight hours of sleep, drink less alcohol and practise breathing exercises each morning are not inherently wrong. But when this advice lands on a queer person, it may be the wrong template for a life shaped by social, cultural, medical and psychological realities.
Having worked as a nutritionist for fifteen years, I have seen first-hand the limitations of generic advice. I once assumed that the key to health was following the latest diet perfectly, tracking everything and training intensively, but that approach could only take me so far.
At the same time, I was taking anabolic steroids that came with numerous side effects, living with body dysmorphia, partying most weekends and carrying the weight of childhood trauma. Each of these shaped how I related to food, health, my body and the world around me. Having spent several years healing and working through these experiences, I now understand that supposedly universal health advice becomes far more complicated when it meets the reality of a person’s life.
While my experience is personal, it reflects a wider pattern across our communities. LGBTQIA+ adults and adolescents experience higher rates of eating disorders and disordered eating than heterosexual and cisgender peers, while substance use is also higher among gay and bisexual men and trans people.
Those disparities are not separate from nutrition; they help explain why generic advice fails. Telling someone to ‘eat better’ means little if restriction is bound up with body image or if partying has disrupted appetite, blood sugar, sleep and mood. People can educate themselves around the fundamentals of nutrition but still be entangled with pressure, coping and the conditions of everyday life.
Queer health is also more than medical risk or polished aesthetics. Nutrition can support a more grounded approach to weight loss and muscle gain, ease digestive symptoms that affect confidence around sex, and help the body recover after partying. It can also support the body through hormonal changes during transition, help people live well with HIV, and provide steadier foundations for mental health and family building, among other things. Its value lies in reconnecting what mainstream wellness tends to split apart: the body, the mind, medical treatment and the circumstances of someone’s life.
Queer people do not need a separate set of nutritional rules. What they need is health advice that recognises the realities of their lives, bodies and experiences. The evidence points to a broader problem: much of what we call ‘universal’ health advice has been built around a remarkably narrow idea of who that ‘universal’ person actually is.
Daniel O’Shaughnessy is a nutritionist, functional medicine practitioner and therapist specialising in LGBTQ+ health. The Queer Guide to Nutrition and Lifestyle, is out 21 September 2026.
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