About Amelia McNew, PhD

I'm Amelia McNew, PhD — a nutrition scientist, academic editor, educator, and writer. I hold bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in nutrition science, with graduate coursework spanning biochemistry, human biology, neuroscience, epidemiology, healthcare ethics, and public health. My work examines the ethics of how nutrition and wellness information reaches the public, who it is applied to, and where it shifts from science to supposition.

I have accumulated over 20 years of editorial experience. For academic editing and research consulting, I specialize in literature reviews and narrative support for qualitative methodologies, results, and discussion sections across health sciences, social sciences, and education. I work with qualitative researchers, particularly those using narrative inquiry and reflexive thematic analysis. I also support grant writing, helping researchers build literature reviews and needs statements that establish both the scholarly gap and the real-world urgency their work addresses.

My research centers on the ethics of health communication to laypersons — how wellness texts, nutrition media, and food-as-medicine narratives speak to people about their bodies, their conditions, and their futures. My dissertation analyzed 13 commercially published diet books marketed to people with multiple sclerosis, using narrative inquiry and Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis through a relational disability theory lens. The six themes that emerged converged into a new theoretical framework I call wellgenics: an ideology that positions health as humanity's inherent birthright redeemable through mandated self-optimization — inseparable from the capitalist ecosystem that sells it and the class position required to buy it.

One mechanism through which wellgenics is operationalized is nutritional ableism — the application of healthist and ableist ideologies to food and dietary practices, through which 'optimal' nutrition is positioned as universally accessible and obligatory regardless of resources or structural barriers. I examine how nutrition communication often fails to address the social determinants of health that shape who can actually follow a protocol, who benefits from one, and who is blamed when a protocol fails.

My pedagogy and educational philosophy are interconnected with my research lens: education is an equity-first issue, and I teach through a posture of critical inquiry and structural inclusion. I ask students to notice who is represented and who is not. My coursework centers diverse perspectives rather than treating majority experience as the default "normal" against which others are measured. Marginalized and minority experiences are held as equal, majority-constructed systems and structures are examined, and harms are dissected rather than minimized.

My current research includes the Wellgenics Study and critical analysis of wellness texts and nutrition research, published at Ethics in Nutrition. For readers outside academia, I write at Factual Wellness, a fiscally sponsored, open access project that breaks down pop-culture wellness myths and reviews nutrition studies in accessible language.