Nutritionism

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 concept's most prominent opponent, and popularizer of the term, journalist Michael Pollan, 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 today. He compares Nutritionism to a religion, relying on "priests" (nutritional scientists and journalists) 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.

...
Wikipedia