Eesha Khan | Question Before You Trust: Navigating Food in an Age of Confusion
Feb 2026–July 2026
From: Pakistan
“The goal is not to tell people what to eat, but to help them understand what is shaping their choices so those choices can feel more like their own.”
Current Status: In Progress — Research and Exploratory Development
The fellowship’s mapping and discovery phase is complete. My bachelor’s thesis will now strengthen the project’s evidence base by examining how conflicting nutrition information affects public trust, confusion, credibility judgments, and decision-making. These findings will guide the form of the eventual intervention.
Reflection
I entered the fellowship believing that I needed to find the right solution. The most important thing I learned was to resist solving the problem too quickly.
At first, I saw unhealthy food choices mainly through the rise of processed food and convenience-based consumption. As I mapped the system, the question became more complicated. People were not simply lacking information. Many were surrounded by too much information, much of it contradictory, extreme, or commercially influenced. At the same time, their choices were constrained by money, time, health, family structures, culture, access, and exhaustion.
The fellowship taught me to look beyond individual behaviour and ask what conditions produce it. It also made me question my own intervention: if people are already overwhelmed, would asking them to pause and think simply give them another responsibility?
That question shifted my practice. I no longer want to create a tool that tells people exactly what to eat. I want to understand how support can build awareness and autonomy without creating more guilt. I also became more comfortable with uncertainty. Good research does not exist to prove my assumptions right. It should be capable of changing my mind.
I am a psychology student, researcher, and content writer from Pakistan. I entered the fellowship through a question that was already part of my own life: why does taking care of our health feel so difficult when information is everywhere?
Living with a sensitive gut and anxiety made food decisions feel more immediate to me. I could not always ignore the effects of skipped meals, unsuitable foods, or confusing advice. Yet trying to find answers often created another problem. Online health information was abundant but contradictory, healthcare was not always accessible or reassuring, and even small attempts to eat better could begin to feel inadequate.
My background in psychology helped me examine the role of cognition, behaviour, trust, and social influence. My work as a writer taught me how to translate complicated ideas into language ordinary people can understand. The fellowship brought these abilities together and helped me see that food choices are not simply personal decisions. They are produced within systems of marketing, culture, technology, healthcare, family life, and economic pressure.
I came to the fellowship hoping to create a solution. Instead, I first learned how to slow down, question my assumptions, and understand the problem more honestly.
The Problem/Field
Young adults are surrounded by more health and nutrition information than ever, yet making an ordinary food decision can still feel confusing and exhausting. Online advice frequently contradicts itself: one side presents highly controlled lifestyles as the standard for health, while the other normalizes overconsumption and convenience-based eating. Influencers, brands, algorithms, family routines, financial pressures, and limited access to trustworthy professionals further shape what people believe and choose.
This is often framed as a problem of discipline or knowledge. My work approaches it as a systems problem involving trust, information overload, decision fatigue, access, marketing, culture, and power. People do not make food choices in isolation. Their decisions are shaped by what is affordable, available, promoted, socially accepted, and realistic within their lives.
The project examines the gap between knowing what is considered healthy and being able to act on that knowledge without becoming overwhelmed.
The Community
The work focuses primarily on young adults who are trying to care for their health while navigating conflicting online advice, limited time, financial pressure, family expectations, and everyday mental fatigue.
The project initially centred urban Pakistani households. Early observations and conversations, however, showed that many people were either not the main decision-makers in their homes or were not actively looking for support around food choices. I therefore broadened the focus to English-speaking young adults who already engage with health content but struggle to determine what is trustworthy and realistic.
This work is informed by lived experience, informal conversations, research, and observation of how people encounter health information online. The next phase will require more direct community participation so that any eventual tool is shaped with people rather than merely designed for them.
What the Community Receives
The project aims to return practical, understandable, and evidence-informed resources that help people:
Recognize how marketing, influencers, algorithms, and social norms shape food decisions.
Evaluate the credibility of nutrition claims without needing to become experts.
Distinguish useful guidance from fear-based, extreme, or commercially motivated content.
Make small decisions that fit their health, culture, budget, capacity, and daily life.
Develop greater self-trust without being pressured to optimize every meal.
The eventual output may take the form of an educational toolkit, direct-to-fact media resource, reflective decision-making tool, or community-based platform. The final format will be guided by research and community feedback rather than selected in advance.
Driving Values/Philosophy
My work is driven by a belief that people should not be blamed for struggling inside systems that consume their time, attention, energy, and trust.
Health advice often assumes ideal conditions: enough money, time, knowledge, access, control, and emotional capacity. Real life is rarely that simple. I therefore value solutions that begin with people’s actual circumstances rather than expecting them to organize their lives around perfect recommendations.
My approach combines skepticism with hope. I question simplified claims, quick fixes, institutional authority, and systems that benefit from confusion. At the same time, I do not believe that exposing harm is enough. People also need clarity, agency, community, and realistic ways forward.
The principles guiding my work are:
Reality over comfort: I would rather examine an uncomfortable truth than offer an answer that sounds reassuring but ignores complexity.
Awareness without guilt: Information should help people understand their choices, not make them ashamed of what their circumstances allow.
Simplicity without oversimplification: Complex ideas should be made understandable without removing the context and uncertainty that make them true.
Evidence with humility: Research matters, but it should remain open to contradiction, limitations, and lived knowledge.
Autonomy over control: A useful intervention should strengthen people’s judgment rather than replace it with another rigid authority.
Progress without perfection: Small, sustainable decisions matter more than ideal routines that only work under ideal conditions.
Community knowledge alongside expertise: Professionals hold important knowledge, but so do people who cook, care for families, manage illness, work within limited budgets, and learn through everyday experience.
This connects with KiraKira’s mission because sustaining people’s “sparkle” requires more than asking them to become resilient inside exhausting systems. It means creating conditions where people feel informed rather than overwhelmed, supported rather than blamed, and capable of acting without having to become perfect.
