Nutritionism Comes to Louisville

Bloggers note: I submitted the following opinion to the Louisville Courier-Journal in response to the Louisville Health Department's $500,000 plan to require local restaurants to list the calories in their menu items.  And guess what?  They've blown me off.

The Louisville Health Department's plan to get local restaurants to list the number of calories contained in menu items is another example of nutritionism, a fake science that has dominated Americans' perspectives on food and eating for over a quarter century.  As author Michael Pollan--who will be visting Louisville in October--demonstrates in his 2008 book In Defense of Food, the consequence of nutritionism has been to make Americans less healthy and more ignorant about food than they ever were.

Nutritionism is not a science but an ideology (Pollan, p. 28)--a pervasive but unexamined set of assumptions--that posits the best way to eat is not to focus on food itself but on the nutrients in the food.  This unfortunate perspective oversimplifies the complexity of the food we eat, its dynamic interaction with the land and soil, and the political and cultural factors that influence people's health and happiness.  The gist is that a "nutrient-by-nutrient" approach to food ignores everything about how people live beyond a dumbed-down breakdown of the nutrients in their food.  In other words, nutritionism does not take the old saying "You are what you eat" with a grain of salt, as it were (because, of course, salt is bad for you!).  While this saying may be helpful to six year olds who don't understand why they shouldn't eat ice cream all day long, it does not qualify as sound scientific thinking adults ought to understand and appreciate.

Which is a big part of my objection to the Health Department's initiative: putting the calories of food selections on menus is a way of treating adults like children.  How clueless and helpless does the Health Department think its tax paying public is?  Do I need to be held by the hand every waking second and told what I should and shouldn't eat or drink by complete strangers with whom I have absolutely no social relationship?  How soon before government bureaucrats sit down next to me and cut my food up in "safe," chewable bites?

What is so pathetic about nutritionism and the recent proposal to list the calories on menu items is that no one has stopped to ask themselves why adults would need such information in the first place.  If people don't know anything about the food they are eating, what, may I ask, do they know about?  What are they learning--if anything--at the universities that raise tuition every year while their basketball teams play in multi-million dollar areans named after fast food industries?  As much as I like Pollan's book, I wonder how dysfunctional society has to become for people to need someone to write a book reminding them of what food is and how they ought to eat it.

The Health Department's proposal perpetuates the unexamined assumptions behind nutritionism--the idea that blind trust in the food industry and a nutrient-by-nutrient focused approach to food will solve all our problems.  But as Pollan's book--and the numerous journal articles he cites (pp. 206-214)--demonstrates, nutritionism not only fails to make people healthier, it does the opposite.  Never before in our nation's history have obesity, diabetes, and heart disease rates been higher in our population, and today these health problems affect children as well as adults.  Nutritionism's mantra ought to be "Eat right, get fatter" (p. 50), the title of one of the sections from Pollan's book.

Here is a local case in point.  About two years ago, the C-J ran an article about a 24 year old who died of heart disease because the doctors who identified his symptoms ruled out that they were attributable to heart disease.  Why?  Because not long ago it was unheard of that someone in their mid-twenties would get heart disease, a health problem associated with people in middle and late adulthood.  Here is where nutritionism goes wrong: by ignorning the complexity of human existence, it ignores the way people live, insisting that only lack of nutrients and excess of calories they consume offer explanations for their health problems.  In the case of this young man, the fact he got no exercise, sat around and played video games, and passively gobbled up fast food and snacks all day rather than actively participating in the preparation of the food he ate and sharing it with family and friends during something known as a meal were his undoing.  The point is that during the nutritionism era a 24 year old died of a health problem that in previous generations only occured in older people.  How does that demonstrate an improved understanding of food and health?  It doesn't.  As his mother explained, "His age killed him," a sad reference to the fact that even medical experts would never have thought someone just ought of college could be suffering from heart disease.  Welcome to "The Age of Nutritionism" (p. 17).

Here's another local example.  Recently the C-J published an article on pedestrian deaths here in Louisville.  Now, why are people risking their lives just because they cross a street or ride a bicycle?  Because Louisville's infrastructure is designed for automotive traffic, and it will never be altered for a light-rail public transit system that would eliminate overdependence on the automobile and make walking and bicycling safe and enjoyable.  So a city where it is either dangerous or miserable to get around by any means besides driving is a place where it is difficult to get regular, daily exercise, which, obviously affects people's health, regardless of how much time they spend at stoplights calculating how many more calories they are allowed to consume for the day by their local government.

Not that most people in Louisville care.  Besides being a car culture forever stalled in the 1970s, there is a local aversion to exercise here that is not just unhealthy but cryptic and primitive.  Just this week, for example, the C-J reported that the Southern Baptist Seminary has condemned yoga since it is rooted in Eastern mysticism and goes against Christianity.  Yoga is unquestionably both a good form of exercise as well as a meditative means to emotional and mental health.  The calm and peace it brings practitioners runs contrary to the frenetic, rampaging violence that feeds the consumerism that leads to big profits for the food industry and the mindlessness that keeps people listening to religious authorities who condemn exercise and introspection.  Sorry to tell you, but praying to Jesus will not lower obesity rates, diabetes, or heart disease, but participating in activities like yoga, bicycling, and walking will.

All of these political and cultural factors remain unaccounted for in nutritionism's paradigm.  If the package is green and the words "nutrients," "vitamins," and "low-fat" appear on it, then the public will no more question the credibility of the corporation selling the food product than big oil will encourage the public to get around by bike or Christian demagogues will encourage their followers to learn about Buddhism.  That nutritionism does not account for these political and cultural factors gives away that it is a fake science.  An honest, scientific analysis of the mounting health problems that have developed during the "Age of Nutritionism" would have long ago exiled it to the Ideological Dinosaur Museum where it would have taken its rightful place on the shelf next to witch hunts, sorcery, and human sacrifice (which our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could qualify as, but that's a different blog).  Nutritionism is an ideology motivated by profit, not a science motivated by knowledge.

But the worst thing about nutritionism isn't its fraudulent nature or the fact it makes people less healthy in the name of promoting healthy eating.  The worst thing about nutritionism is that it takes the pleasure out of eating and erases food culture.  Humans learn about food--how to grow it, prepare it, and eat it--through family and community.  As Kentucky writer Wendell Berry puts it, "Eating is an agricultural act."  Government and fake science cannot replace cultural knowledge that has been shared among generations for centuries.  The idea that it can is at once absurd and sinister.

I am not a farmer.  But I know people who do farm, and I make an active effort to spend time on farms and learn what I can about food and the land from which it comes.  One weekend I helped a friend out on his farm move piles of wood, clumsily side-stepping nails sticking out of the boards.  Recently I met a farmer in the mountains of western North Carolina, and I've made plans to return there in the fall where I will for the first time milk a cow.  Then I will sample some raw milk--in blatant defiance of nutritionist dogma.  By nightfall, I will sit down at a table with other like-minded folks, and share a meal consisting of fresh, local food made by the people I'm eating with and harvested from the land that has brought us and this food together.  I will enjoy learning how to milk a cow, the unpleasant odors of the barn, the food I will eat and company I will share it with.  I will not ask anyone to provide me with a list of calories or nutrients in the food I'm eating.

Which brings me to my last point.  At the end of another stressful American day, the last thing I want to do when I go to a pub or diner is to have yet one more thing to think about and worry over.  I do not go out to eat to make more analytical decisions.  I want to enjoy my food; I don't want to worry about it.  How much anxiety and guilt must I endure before I can let down my guard and just enjoy living in my human body?  How utterly void of pleasure and self-confidence does my existence have to be?  But if the Health Department and its ideologues have their way, the people of Louisville will get another serving of fake science and false hope: another version of the American fantasy world where obese fourth-graders will simply disappear thanks to the availability of more "expert" information, and the willingness of the gullible public to let the authorities live their lives and place their orders for them.  Bon Appetite!

Dr. David W. Overbey is an Assistant Professor of English at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky.  He has focused on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Omnivore's Dilemma in his courses for the last four years.