Feb
26th
Thu
26th
By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular actual food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as
follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is precisely what we did.
We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dis pensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It’s hard
to imagine the low-fat/high-carb craze taking off as it did or our collective health deteriorating to the extent that it has if McGovern’s original food-based recommendation had stood: Eat less meat and fewer dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another carton of Snackwell’s is
just what the doctor ordered? You begin to see how attractive nutritionism is for all parties concerned, consumers as well as producers, not to mention the nutrition scientists and journalists it renders indispensable. The ideology offers a respectable rationale for creating and marketing all manner of new processed foods and permission
for people to eat them. Plus, every course correction in nutritionist advice gives reason to write new diet books and articles, manufacture a new line of products, and eat a whole bunch of even more healthy new food products. And if a product is healthy by design and official sanction, then eating Jots of it must be healthy too—maybe even more so.
follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is precisely what we did.
We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dis pensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It’s hard
to imagine the low-fat/high-carb craze taking off as it did or our collective health deteriorating to the extent that it has if McGovern’s original food-based recommendation had stood: Eat less meat and fewer dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another carton of Snackwell’s is
just what the doctor ordered? You begin to see how attractive nutritionism is for all parties concerned, consumers as well as producers, not to mention the nutrition scientists and journalists it renders indispensable. The ideology offers a respectable rationale for creating and marketing all manner of new processed foods and permission
for people to eat them. Plus, every course correction in nutritionist advice gives reason to write new diet books and articles, manufacture a new line of products, and eat a whole bunch of even more healthy new food products. And if a product is healthy by design and official sanction, then eating Jots of it must be healthy too—maybe even more so.
— In Defense of Food
