HERE’S TO FOOD – DOWN WITH ‘NUTRITIONISM’
This is 2022’s Nutrition Issue. We do them quite a lot, as regular readers will know. They seem to be popular, probably because most men now realise that, as far as weight-loss metrics go, the macronutrients you eat are ultimately more significant than steps taken, power generated or weight lifted. Even so, I confess the word ‘nutrition’ isn’t one of my favourites. Probably because I don’t like eating fats, proteins and carbs for dinner. I like eating food. And food is not nutrition. In fact, culturally, scientifically, psychologically and economically, food and nutrition are entirely different things. It’s complicated.
One of the best thinkers and writers on all this is the US journalist Michael Pollan, though he has long since turned his attention from the kitchen table to the effects of opioids and psychedelics on the mind. Still, I consider his 2008 treatise, In Defence Of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, to be the most lucid account of the fundamental differences between what we eat and what we ingest.
Pollan’s rules for sustenance have become renowned for their prescriptive simplicity: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ His seemingly elementary instruction to ‘eat food’ is also a pointed prohibition of the abundant ‘edible food-like substances in the supermarket… novel products of food science [that] often come in packages festooned with health claims’. This shift away from how one’s grandparents might have eaten – dependent on ingredients that were seasonally available, affordable, unrefined – towards the highly processed food culture we now live in, Pollan argues, is largely down to ‘nutritionism’. The suffix is important. That -ism suggests we’re not talking about a science but an ideology. And here the ideology is that food equals nutrients.
Of course, such thinking ignores the fact that nutrients isolated from the context of the foodstuffs whence they originate do not behave in the same way. It overlooks the fact that the foods we eat are, by implication, as significant as the foods we do not. And that the combinations we eat them in alters the way in which their nutrients are absorbed. Isolating nutrients from foods can also lead to widescale misinformation and indoctrination, as we’ve seen with the demonisation of fat and the explosion of processed ‘low-fat’ products in the aisles. ‘Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet,’ notes Pollan, drily.
It’s easy to blame bad science and greedy business for all this, and he does. But Pollan is also clear that the media is complicit. ‘Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us,’ he says. ‘To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.’ This is where we find ourselves in a slightly sticky position. It’s also another of the reasons why the word ‘nutrition’ isn’t one of my favourites.
Is Men’s Health guilty of reducing food to the sum of its nutrient parts for the sake of a headline? Are we practising nutritionism? Well, insomuch as we routinely present the findings of studies around vitamins and antioxidants in fun ways, and that we have a feature in this current issue going by the knowingly playful title of ‘50 Best & Worst Foods For Men’, the answer has to be yes. But in my time as editor, I’ve always been adamant that we celebrate food in its delectable glory. By which I mean real, satisfying, toothsome, ambrosial dishes – not things that have been compromised or tempered in the name of dietetics. And that’s because I love food and want to eat the finest, most mouth-watering morsels I can, albeit while understanding the health benefits – and detriments – of doing so. In this respect, I think we deliver. Understanding calories does not necessarily mean undermining the value of a flavoursome bite.
But there are other issues that further complicate the simple instruction to ‘eat food’ that have arguably become more pressing since those words were written. The simple act of eating has become political, in the sense that what we collectively choose to put in our mouths has huge ramifications for the environment as well as our health. Pollan described the logical assumption that ‘if you eat a lot of meat [then] you’re probably not eating a lot of vegetables’ as a zero-sum relationship. But with the inexorable rise of processed meat substitutes on supermarket shelves and fast-food menus, there are arguably more losers than winners.
As our feature on the burgeoning plant-based food industry suggests, Pollan’s nutritionism is being replaced by a kind of ersatz conservationism. Plantbased companies are marketing themselves as saviours of the planet on account of their eschewal of meat, never mind that their focus on single-use crops, far-flung ingredients and factory-produced chemicals suggests quite the contrary.
Somewhere along the road, the hunger for more salutary food has led many of us to forget what constitutes real food. This issue is, in small part, an attempt to address that.