Nutritionism
Encyclopedia
Nutritionism is a paradigm
Paradigm
The word paradigm has been used in science to describe distinct concepts. It comes from Greek "παράδειγμα" , "pattern, example, sample" from the verb "παραδείκνυμι" , "exhibit, represent, expose" and that from "παρά" , "beside, beyond" + "δείκνυμι" , "to show, to point out".The original Greek...

 that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet
Diet (nutrition)
In nutrition, diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat. With the word diet, it is often implied the use of specific intake of nutrition for health or weight-management...

. In other words, it is the idea that the nutritional value of a food is the sum of all its individual nutrients, vitamins, and other components. Another aspect of the term is the implication that the only point of eating is to promote bodily health. The term is largely pejorative, implying that this way of viewing food is simplistic and harmful. The term's most prominent proponent, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. A 2006 New York Times book review describes him as a "liberal foodie intellectual."...

, argues that a food's nutritional value is "more than the sum of its parts."

Originally credited to Gyorgy Scrinis, the notion was popularized by Michael Pollan. The key to Pollan's understanding of nutritionism is "the widely shared but unexamined assumption ... that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient." Since nutrients are invisible, it is now necessary to rely on nutrition experts to make food choices. Because science has an incomplete understanding of how food affects the human body, Pollan argues, relying solely on information regarding individual nutrients has led people and policy makers to repeatedly make poor decisions relating to nutrition. Pollan blames nutritionism for many of the health problems relating to diet in the Western World
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...

 today. He compares Nutritionism to a religion, relying on "priests" (nutritional scientists and journalists) to interpret the latest orthodoxy
Orthodoxy
The word orthodox, from Greek orthos + doxa , is generally used to mean the adherence to accepted norms, more specifically to creeds, especially in religion...

 for the masses. Like many religions, nutritionism has divided the world into good and evil components, although what is good or evil can change dramatically with time.

Pollan believes that nutritionism is inherently flawed due to a reductive
Reduction (philosophy)
In philosophy, reduction is the process by which one object, property, concept, theory, etc., is shown to be explicable in terms of another, lower level, entity...

 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 believes that nutritionism "is driven by a set of first year undergraduate errors in interpreting scientific data." In his opinion professional researchers and medical experts bear some blame for nutritionism, but the primary promoters of the ideology are media "gurus" and journalists with an incomplete understanding of science and a credulous public, willing to believe whatever simplistic theories they are told in the mass media.

At least one observer, Daniel Engber has argued that Pollan's anti-nutritionism, or anti-food science
Food science
Food science is a study concerned with all technical aspects of foods, beginning with harvesting or slaughtering, and ending with its cooking and consumption, an ideology commonly referred to as "from field to fork"...

 stance has taken on a dogmatic tint itself. He says, "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." One criticism is that while many scientific studies of nutrition, or the conclusions extrapolated from them by both scientists and journalists have been bad, we should not reject a scientific approach to food altogether. One reviewer notes that the study of vitamin
Vitamin
A vitamin is an organic compound required as a nutrient in tiny amounts by an organism. In other words, an organic chemical compound is called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism, and must be obtained from the diet. Thus, the term is conditional both on...

s and nutrients led to vast improvement in treatment of diseases such as beriberi
Beriberi
Beriberi is a nervous system ailment caused by a thiamine deficiency in the diet. Thiamine is involved in the breakdown of energy molecules such as glucose and is also found on the membranes of neurons...

 or scurvy
Scurvy
Scurvy is a disease resulting from a deficiency of vitamin C, which is required for the synthesis of collagen in humans. The chemical name for vitamin C, ascorbic acid, is derived from the Latin name of scurvy, scorbutus, which also provides the adjective scorbutic...

and that with further refinement food science may well help combat other diseases and health conditions. The complexity of food science should not be taken as a reason to abandon systematic investigation of it. Daniel Engber also argues that Pollan over idealizes the diet of our ancestors, and believes that it may not be well suited to our modern needs.
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