Both the system and our personal choices have been heavily driven by our beliefs about nutrition.
If they weren’t, would such a large percentage of food packaging be taken up by nutritional labels? Why else would the federal government spend so much money and time creating food groups, food pyramids, recommended daily allowances, and daily minimum requirements? Why else would the FDA create and enforce rules about what food, drug, and supplement manufacturers are allowed to claim as health benefits?
So although it doesn’t make the news very often, food, and our national policies about it, determine a great deal about our society. And nearly everything our society believes about nutrition has reductionist fingerprints all over it. In this chapter, we’ll explore how the reductionist paradigm has led to poor nutritional policy and confused consumers, as well as how and why nutrition resists the reductionist model our society works hard to put it in.
REDUCTIONIST NUTRITIONAL SCIENCE
The definition of the word nutrition is something I’ve thought about a lot: every so often during my fifty years in academia, our nutrition faculty would have a retreat and spend some of the time trying to figure out what the word really means. These could not have been very productive, because the same discussion had a way of reappearing at every retreat.
Each time, we’d eventually conclude with some default definition, something resembling the ones found in standard dictionaries. Something like “a process of providing or obtaining food necessary for health and growth” (Oxford English Dictionary) or “the act or process of nourishing or being nourished; specifically the sum of the processes by which an animal or plant takes in and utilizes food substances” (Webster’s).
I don’t like either definition. Webster’s definition fails partly on technical grounds because it uses the word nourished, which is a derivative of the word nutrition. You can’t define a word by referring to itself! That Webster’s resorts to this sleight of hand shows how troublesome the word really is.
The other, more substantial problem with the Webster’s entry is the word sum. I remember sums from grade school math. We added two numbers and got a third. The third, which we called the sum, was nothing more or less than what you got by adding the first two numbers. That’s the very soul of reductionism, remember: the sum (total) can be completely known if you know each individual part.
Both Oxford and Webster’s use the word process, which points to something important but, on its own, is inexcusably vague. The Oxford definition focuses entirely on the process of nutrition as something that occurs outside the body: food is either provided or obtained. This leaves no room for nutrition as an internal, biological process, nor a complex one. To reductionists, nutrition is just the arithmetic summation of the effects of individual nutrients. These misleading definitions in two of the most respected and frequently used English dictionaries show how profoundly the reductionist concept is embedded in our culture.
If you were taught statements like, “Calcium grows strong bones,” “Vitamin A is necessary for good eyesight,” and “Vitamin E is a cancer-fighting antioxidant,” you learned nutrition the same way. The same is true if you count calories, or pay attention to percentages on the nutritional labels on packaged foods, or wonder if you get enough protein, or startslathering your fries in catsup because you hear tomatoes are a good source of lycopene.
These beliefs make sense only in a reductionist paradigm that identifies the component parts of food—the individual nutrients—and figures out exactly what each one does in the body and how much of it we need. And this is precisely what we scientists are trained to do. I was taught nutrition in this way and I taught it the same way to my students. This included an upper-level course in
If they weren’t, would such a large percentage of food packaging be taken up by nutritional labels? Why else would the federal government spend so much money and time creating food groups, food pyramids, recommended daily allowances, and daily minimum requirements? Why else would the FDA create and enforce rules about what food, drug, and supplement manufacturers are allowed to claim as health benefits?
So although it doesn’t make the news very often, food, and our national policies about it, determine a great deal about our society. And nearly everything our society believes about nutrition has reductionist fingerprints all over it. In this chapter, we’ll explore how the reductionist paradigm has led to poor nutritional policy and confused consumers, as well as how and why nutrition resists the reductionist model our society works hard to put it in.
REDUCTIONIST NUTRITIONAL SCIENCE
The definition of the word nutrition is something I’ve thought about a lot: every so often during my fifty years in academia, our nutrition faculty would have a retreat and spend some of the time trying to figure out what the word really means. These could not have been very productive, because the same discussion had a way of reappearing at every retreat.
Each time, we’d eventually conclude with some default definition, something resembling the ones found in standard dictionaries. Something like “a process of providing or obtaining food necessary for health and growth” (Oxford English Dictionary) or “the act or process of nourishing or being nourished; specifically the sum of the processes by which an animal or plant takes in and utilizes food substances” (Webster’s).
I don’t like either definition. Webster’s definition fails partly on technical grounds because it uses the word nourished, which is a derivative of the word nutrition. You can’t define a word by referring to itself! That Webster’s resorts to this sleight of hand shows how troublesome the word really is.
The other, more substantial problem with the Webster’s entry is the word sum. I remember sums from grade school math. We added two numbers and got a third. The third, which we called the sum, was nothing more or less than what you got by adding the first two numbers. That’s the very soul of reductionism, remember: the sum (total) can be completely known if you know each individual part.
Both Oxford and Webster’s use the word process, which points to something important but, on its own, is inexcusably vague. The Oxford definition focuses entirely on the process of nutrition as something that occurs outside the body: food is either provided or obtained. This leaves no room for nutrition as an internal, biological process, nor a complex one. To reductionists, nutrition is just the arithmetic summation of the effects of individual nutrients. These misleading definitions in two of the most respected and frequently used English dictionaries show how profoundly the reductionist concept is embedded in our culture.
If you were taught statements like, “Calcium grows strong bones,” “Vitamin A is necessary for good eyesight,” and “Vitamin E is a cancer-fighting antioxidant,” you learned nutrition the same way. The same is true if you count calories, or pay attention to percentages on the nutritional labels on packaged foods, or wonder if you get enough protein, or startslathering your fries in catsup because you hear tomatoes are a good source of lycopene.
These beliefs make sense only in a reductionist paradigm that identifies the component parts of food—the individual nutrients—and figures out exactly what each one does in the body and how much of it we need. And this is precisely what we scientists are trained to do. I was taught nutrition in this way and I taught it the same way to my students. This included an upper-level course in
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