Nutritionism
June 26, 2009
My development studies professor asked us to read and reflect on this:
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=151481
After reading the articles, I immediately looked for a copy of the book In Defense of Food (and I got one). Pollan argues that what we consume as “food” is no longer food – they are edible food-like substances. Though Pollan discusses more about the evils of contemporary Western diet, his arguments are somehow applicable in the rest of the world; after all, even diets tend to follow the Western lead anywhere (globalization of diet?)
The book’s title implies that food is under attack and that it needs defending. Who’s the attacker? According to Pollan, food is under attack from the Nutrition Industrial Complex (probably a play from the well-established Military-Industrial Complex of the US), scientists and food marketers eager to exploit every shift in the nutrition consensus. The Nutrition Industrial Complex has constructed an ideology of nutrition that has reduced eating into (1) the ingestion of nutrients, (2) an affair guided by “experts” in nutrition, and, (3) a tool for the latest concept of physical health.
What is nutritionism?
Pollan devotes a chapter on the definition of nutritionism, which, by the way, isn’t his. The word was coined by Gyorgy Scrinis, an Australian sociologist. It is an ideology, and as far as all ideologies go, it is unscientific. The key assumption of nutritionism is that food is the sum of its nutrient parts. Eating, therefore, becomes the practice of ingesting nutrients. However, nutrients are chemicals that most people don’t understand or have no way of identifying; people need “experts” to guide them into ingesting the nutrients. Thus the establishment of very powerful and paternalistic nutrition-food science-food marketing institutions that dictate what people should eat for the purpose of health promotion.
The history of nutritionism is bloody. Generally there are three macronutrients: proteins, carbohydrates and fats. It is to the nutritionist’ interests to see them all three in a war against each other. Because of the vastness of the domains of each of the three macronutrients, civil wars flame within their own empires (animal protein versus plant protein, saturated fats versus unsaturated fats, refined carbohydrates versus fiber). What results is confusion among the people. And where there is confusion there is fear and an opportunity for deceit. Nutritionists feed, if not the physical body, the public’s need for order and assurance. Nutritionists choose their side (the Good) and wage a holy war against the other (the Bad) and lead the people to a crusade to save their bodies from the evils of unscientific and “unbalanced’ eating.
I think this belief, that there are “good” and “bad” nutrients, is based on Western culture’s destructive way of analyzing things. Western thought is very simplistic (reductionist in Pollan’s terms) and tends to break complex things into simpler ones at the expense of losing the whole picture. We mistake the trees (nutrients) for the forest (food). The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Eating 6 units of nutrient X and 5 units of nutrient Y extracted from Food A is not as good as eating Food A, whole and unprocessed. Sadly, this is not the view nutritionists take. As long as industrial and artificial products designed to be “food” have the same nutritional value as the real food they are modeled after, they are the same. No, not the same. Better. Better for them and for the food industry hell-bent on making money, regardless if it makes us sick, and the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry more focused on reversing the damage (for those who can afford it) than preventing it in the first place.
Escaping nutritionism
Escaping nutritionism is hard since most of the foods we have today is processed. Going back to nature – living in thatched huts and hunting game isn’t an appealing or practical prospect for most of us. But we can turn back from the Western diet, a diet characterized by the predominance of industrial products. Pollan tells of an algorithm that is informed of ecological and social relationships that should guide us towards healthier eating. Broadly summarized: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Reference
Pollan, Michael. (2008). In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: The Penguin Press.
Download at
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/cooking_diets/In_Defense_of_Food.html
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