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From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jan 28, 2007 5:21 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: New York Times Magazine cover story on nutrition 1/28/07

The cover story of this week’s (January 28) Sunday New York Times Magazine is “The Age of Nutritionism: How Scientists Have Ruined the Way We Eat.” It is by Michael Pollan, the well-known author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and of various other New York Magazine stories on food. Inside, page 39, the article is headed, “Unhappy Meals: Thirty years of nutritional science has made Americans sicker, fatter and less well nourished. A plea for a return to plain old food.”

Pollan opens with:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

“That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

Pollan discusses the science of “nutritionism,” writing, “it really wasn’t until late in the 20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.”

He writes:

“No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States.’ The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

“Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually ‘reduce consumption of meat’ — was replaced by artful compromise: ‘Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.’

“A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to ‘eat less’ of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called ’saturated fat.’

“The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.”

The article discusses misleading studies and bad dietary advice. And it gives healthful dietary advice. It is lengthy, interesting, and informative. And it presents a wonderful opportunity for letters from people thriving on plant based diets.

You’ll find the full article on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html.

The New York Times Magazine takes letters at magazine [at] nytimes.com.

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line.)

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