The Perils of Nutritionism

“Nutrition science is sorta where surgery was in the year 1650. Interesting, fascinating to watch, but do you really want them operating on you yet?”

-Michael Pollan

Low fat diets, low carbohydrate diets, protein shakes, multivitamins… Who else thinks it’s weird that the more we try and micromanage what we eat, the more out of shape we as a society get?

Although the ever-increasing numbers of nutritionists, dietitians, and food scientists have given us an ever-more precise understanding of what we are putting into our bodies and how it affects us, they have been largely powerless at improving our health and fitness in general.

Are they lying to us? Are we the punchline of a vast government conspiracy? Or is it something else entirely?

This post is a culmination of my criticism of the practicality of nutritionism. Check out my recent posts on fat, carbohydrates, and protein to find out why you shouldn’t be scared of any of these macronutrients.

Nutrients for Dinner

Is anyone else upset that we haven’t got “food-in-a-pill” on the market yet?

When I was a kid, it seemed inevitable that by the year 2000, we’d be free of grocery shopping, cooking, and going out to eat altogether. Instead, we’d just pop different enriched pills for pot roast, steamed asparagus, and apple pie, therefore ensuring we get all of our necessary vitamins.

I mean really, we have figured out the nutrient composition of food to such a precise degree that this couldn’t be too far off, could it?

To be fair, we’ve been trying our damnedest to get to that point. The closest things we have are MREs for soldiers and space food for astronauts. But take a trip to your grocery store and you’ll see plenty of similar stuff. Fortified cereal! Organic mac and cheese! Omega-3 enriched eggs! Selling food these days has less to do with the quality of the food itself and more about the nutrients that can (or cannot) be found in it.

Nutritionism Defined

I have a kind of begrudging admiration for author Michael Pollan. I can tell that he’s genuinely trying to save the world, but I have reservations about some of the ways in which he’s trying to do so.

On the one hand, he is a strong advocate that everyone should eat like rich people. He’s pretty out of touch with those of us in society who are barely scraping by. And he’s fairly meat-phobic and a proponent of caloric restriction. (Boo, hiss.)

On the other hand, his second book, In Defense of Food, is incredible, and far more insightful that his more-popular The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In this book, he takes on the new science of nutritionism and shows how it is pretty inept at doing what it set out to do in the first place: help us get healthier.

He defines nutritionism with these four principles:

1. The most important thing about any food is the nutrients it contains.
2. These nutrients are either good or evil.
3. We need experts to teach us how to eat.
4. The whole point of eating is health.

If you read these four things and think, “yeah, that sounds right to me,” then we have some debunking to do…

The Microscope and the Telescope

In our modern culture, food is looked at less and less as “food” and more as “nutrient delivery systems.”

• Poultry has become “lean protein.”
• Butter, lard, and tallow have become “saturated fats.”
• Fruits and vegetables have become “high in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.”
• Potatoes have become “high-glycemic carbs.”

Look at how we treat fat, for example. For a long time, there was only “fat.” Then it became “saturated fat” and “unsaturated fat.” Then unsaturated fat turned into “monounsaturated fat” and “polyunsaturated fat.” And now we’re seeing more and more talk about the specific molecules of fatty acids themselves, such as “palmitic acid,” “oleic acid,” “linoleic acid,” and “arachidonic acid.” AAAAAAGGGGGHHHH! My head hurts!

Go to the front page of Yahoo!, MSN, or any other mainstream news aggregator. Check out any and all nutrition articles that have come out within the past couple of days (there’s bound to be at least one). You’ll probably find that they are either hyping up the next big superfood due to its nutrient content (Rich in CoQ10! Packed with omega-3 fatty acids!) or damning foods for the same reason (saturated fat! cholesterol! sodium! oh my!).

But breaking food down into their nutrients and condemning them like this has never led to realistic and successful diet advice.

Although we can be grateful that food science has progressed to a degree that we can understand much of the constituent nutrients in our food, this method of holding everything under a “microscope” tends to denounce food that many people have thrived on while over-hyping “superfoods,” and no one likes this more than the supplement industry, which can market even more product to people who think they are deficient.

It may sound strange, but we haven’t yet been able to definitively link the nutrients in foods to the healthfulness of the foods themselves. Beta carotene is perhaps the best example of this. Once researchers found that those who consumed a lot of beta carotene-containing foods had a much lower incidence of degenerative disease, the supplement form of this vitamin started selling like crazy. There was only one problem. Later studies found that supplemental beta carotene provided none of the protective benefits found when it was consumed in food.

Although we like to focus on nutrients and their effects individually, they often act much differently when they are consumed in foods rather than in isolation.

Before you get concerned about everything at this “zoomed in” level, you should take a step back and look at it all through a “telescope” instead, first looking at the patterns that are consistent in healthy people before you start trying to figure out what to eliminate from your diet.

Good Food, Bad Food

There are no such things as good or bad nutrients or foods.

For one thing, it is important to note that there is very little food that “wants” to be eaten. Darwin’s laws of natural selection are just as viable for the rest of the world’s organisms as they are for us. In order to deter meat eaters, animals will either escape or fight their predators. Plant foods are a little sneakier. Since they are stuck in one place, they are forced to use such defenses as poison, gut irritants, and antinutrients in order to deter anyone from making dinner out of them.

The only foods that are designed for the sole purpose of consumption are fruit and milk. Fruit is a plant’s way of enticing other animals to disperse their seeds around, and milk is designed for nourishing young mammals. You could try to survive on just dairy and fruit, but I wouldn’t suggest it. (Actually, if you have aspirations of becoming a diet guru, that one is ripe for the pickin’!)

Most of the things we eat don’t “want” to be eaten, but we must consume them in order to survive and thrive. You can think of eating as a kind of “necessary evil” in the world without which life would cease to exist. That this food may turn out to have negative health consequences is therefore unsurprising, but as long as they have a net positive effect, we should continue chowing down.

Currently, foods such as red meat, potatoes, butter, full-fat dairy, and egg yolks are considered to be “bad” because of their fat, carbohydrates, protein, or a combination thereof. This completely ignores the fact that many cultures that have eaten a lot of these foods have been incredibly healthy and fit.

A Pragmatic Approach

So where does this leave us?

What I want you to do is stop getting so bogged down in all the minutiae of vitamins, minerals, calories, fat, carbs, etc. that you have been led to believe are the answer to your quest to improve your health and fitness. Start taking a more pragmatic look at things.

Although we may feel that we need to seek the expert knowledge of nutrition scientists in order to solve our dilemma, the fact is that the healthiest people who have ever walked this planet were completely ignorant of such knowledge. Cavemen didn’t know what calories were. The Okinawans didn’t count carbs. The Maasai didn’t watch their cholesterol. And yet they achieved the rare goal of staying in great shape without ever needing to think about it.

Although scientific studies in the field of nutrition shouldn’t be completely discounted, it’s important to both take a critical look at what has worked for others and experiment on yourself to find what works best for you.

Tagged as: nutrients, nutritionism, real food, supplements