We have been hearing for a hundred years ‘now that nutrition science has identified the secrets of (macronutrients/vitamins/cholesterol/protein-mimicking carbs and fats/latest amazing discovery du jour), we at last hold in our hands the one true key to perfect food and health’. And yet it keeps getting worse and worse even while dieting and ‘fitness’ become more popular (and lucrative) year after year.
Michael Pollan calls this ‘the American paradox’, as a riff on ‘the French paradox’ of people of varied ethnicities (usually France, but also others) eating traditional ‘unhealthy’ food with more regard to pleasure and culture than health and ending up more more healthy anyway.
He suggests the term ‘nutritionism’ for the current situation in which we feel we need the guidance of experts (scientists, doctors, the press, the surgeon general) to know what to eat, and are familiar ourselves with all sorts of highly technical concepts and terms like calories, cholesterol and triglycerides.
And yet we’re no better off with this approach than our great-grandmothers, who had no doubt at all about what to eat based on nothing else than Culture (a fancy term for what their own mothers taught them) and the kind of rudimentary folk knowledge we’d call old wive’s tales now. We’re worse off now than then, in some cases much worse. There’s a good paradox.
I’d say more but it starts getting into personal opinion instead of paraphrasing more interesting thoughts than mine, and there might be no point to it so I’ll leave it at that. But to me that little bit up there was relevant and perhaps though-provoking enough to share.
