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205 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
One of the more pernicious aspects of nutritionism is that it encourages us to blame our health problems on lifestyle choices, implying that the individual bears ultimate responsibility for whatever illnesses befall him. It’s worth keeping in mind that a far more powerful predictor of heart disease than either diet or exercise is social class.Pollan contends that Western society has replaced our relationship with food to a relationship with nutrition, to our great loss. Science has sought to figure out exactly what parts of foods do, and having figured out how this or that part functions, sought to replace the food itself with its nutritive parts. As Doctor Phil might say, “How’s that working out for you?” Not well. What Pollan calls “the Western diet” is a disaster, replacing actual nutrition with a manufactured diet that loses much of the actual benefit that real food provides. This is not a book that offers a prescriptive diet. He is not looking to sell a program, but to argue that the way we eat is out of whack. The nutrition business is not about feeding people but about pushing product. The results are raging epidemics of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Not that a return to a more natural state would eliminate those entirely, but there is compelling research that indicates it would make a significant difference. One interesting thing Pollan notes is that in different parts of the world, people do quite well with various types of diets. There appears not to be a single best way to eat. It does appear that there is a single worst way to eat and we have found it.
Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing. Is this good science or nutritionist prejudice? The epidemiologist John Powles has suggested this predilection is little more than a Puritan bias: Bad things happen to people who eat bad things.Hadn't thought about it that way but...yep! Anyone remember that old axiom "you are what you eat" which is true, but unless you have been very focused on the origins of the food that you eat, you really aren't much in control of that. He also says:
A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species. In most traditional diets, when calories are adequate, nutrient intake will usually be adequate as well.
But while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it’s important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets.I don't know about you, but in this day and age, I'm not interested in following any ideology.