Through his books and his pieces in the New York Times Magazine , he reaches a wide audience with his enlightening arguments about the ignored costs of our sped-up food chain. Pollan can sound like someone out of the nineteenth century, preaching the merits of hard work, moderation, and self-reliant optimism, with lingering traces of old Puritan angst. Up with individual, sensual pleasures. Of course, the answers were distressing.
For one thing, we were eating ruinous quantities of corn, often dozens of times in one serving in the form of sweeteners, oils, and additives. Even at our most conscientious, we could be lured off the path by cleverly pious labeling. Free-range chickens might turn out to have spent no meaningful time outdoors.
Organic asparagus might have been flown in from another hemisphere for our callow convenience. So what, affirmatively speaking, should we be eating? Not too much. Nutritionism is an important contribution to the discourse of the alternative food movement, providing a unique, scholarly rationale for the food-quality paradigm. Gyorgy Scrinis provides a new language for talking about how our ideas about what makes a good diet have come to be. Charlotte Biltekoff, University of California, Davis Scrinis details the ideology of 'nutritionism,' in which the great majority of dietary advice is reduced to statements about a few nutrients.
The resulting cascade is nutrient-based dietary guidelines, nutrition labeling, food engineering, and food marketing. I agree with Scrinis that a broader focus on foods would lead to quite a different scientific and political cascade, including a more healthful diet for many people and a different relationship between the public and the food industry.
One is the huge body of scholarly and popular texts that provide nutritional advice, or tell us what to eat. Scrinis has combed through this literature in exhaustive detail to provide a magnificent synthesis.
A paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine their value in the diet. Nutritionism is an alleged paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet.
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, and the term is usually used to label others' views. The term's most prominent proponent, journalist Michael Pollan, argues that a food's nutritional value is "more than the sum of its parts. The key to Pollan's understanding of nutritionism is "the widely shared but unexamined assumption 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 today. He compares Nutritionism to a religion, relying on "priests" to interpret the latest orthodoxy 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 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.
Article Navigation. Research Article February 01 On the Ideology of Nutritionism gyorgy scrinis gyorgy scrinis. This Site. Google Scholar. Gastronomica 8 1 : 39— Cite Icon Cite. You do not currently have access to this content. View full article.
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