The Brunch Table

Every couple years, it seems, the New York Times puts out a big feature summing up the current scientific views on food and health. For me, the biggest surprise from the latest one is the idea that discussing diet in terms of nutrients, rather than foods, is a political compromise that’s hurting public health.

“It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by ‘nutrients,’ which are not the same thing…Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early 19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout identified what came to be called the ‘macronutrients’: protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished…”

Apparently, the Reagan-era National Academy of Sciences was harrassed by accusations that it favored particular sectors of the food industry over others. (It was producing research suggesting people should eat less meat.) Talking exclusively about nutrients was a way to avoid crossing powerful special interests while keeping their findings honest–or so people thought.

The problem is that our current understanding of nutrients is very limited compared to our understanding of foods as a whole. You can take a solid piece of advice regarding a whole food, try to break it down into what individual nutrients are doing, and get the explanation utterly wrong–because our concept of what’s going on in there biochemically is still rapidly evolving.