Nutritionism

Flaws of the nutritionism paradigm

Problems highlighted by Pollan

Pollan blames nutritionism for many of the health problems relating to diet in the Western World today. He compares Nutritionism to a religion, relying on "priests" (nutrition scientists and journalists) to interpret the latest orthodoxy for the masses. Like many religions, nutritionism has divided the world into good and evil components, although what is considered good or evil can change dramatically over time.

Pollan believes that nutritionism is inherently flawed due to a reductive bias within science to isolate and study individual factors disconnected from their usual contexts such as diet and culture, factors which have repeatedly been shown to have a fundamental impact on nutritional outcomes. Even when scientists have attempted to study factors such as culture, diet, and long term consumption patterns, the enormous difficulties in making accurate measurements relating to individual nutritional components, and producing meaningful conclusions has resulted in incomplete results at best, and misleading or harmful results at worst.

Ben Goldacre wrote that nutritionism, or its attribution to scientists, is the "bollocks du jour", and that it is "driven by a set of first year undergraduate errors in interpreting scientific data."{{cite web

Focus on nutrients instead of on foods

Professor of the history of science Clifford D. Conner notes that the nutritionism paradigm helped U.S. agribusiness shift public attention away from major diet risks like sugar and red meat consumption to risks from nutrients invisible to the public, such as sucrose and saturated fat, respectively. A pathbreaking 1968 Congressional report of the McGovern Committee, entitled "Dietary Goals," called on Americans to reduce consumption of red meat and dairy. However, agribusiness corporate propaganda and industry lobbyists were largely successful in convincing the public and government regulators, respectively, to warn the public to reduce not consumption of sugar, red meat and dairy products, but instead to reduce "sucrose" and "saturated fat" intake. Thus, a federal government report in 1982 was tempered to advise the public to "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

Critique of Pollan

Journalist Daniel Engber has argued that Pollan's anti-nutritionism, or anti–food science stance, has taken on a dogmatic tint itself. Engber wrote: "Modern nutrition may be more of an ideology than a science, but so is Pollan's nutritional Darwinism. The two ideologies stand in direct opposition to one another, with the science-minded progressives on one side and the culinary conservatives on the other."{{cite web

References

References

1. Clifford D. Conner, "The Tragedy of American Science, from Truman to Trump" (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), pp. 16-19