TEN   NUTRITIONISM’S CHILDREN

So where does this leave us eaters? More confused about how to eat than any people in history, would be my strictly unscientific conclusion. Actually, there is some science, admittedly a little soft, which has captured a bit of the confusion that the supposedly harder science of nutrition has sown in the American mind. Paul Rozin is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has dreamed up some of the more imaginative survey questions ever asked of American eaters; the answers he’s collected offer a pretty good index to our current befuddlement and anxiety about eating. He has found, for example, that half of us believe high-calorie foods eaten in small amounts contain more calories than low-calorie foods eaten in much larger amounts. And that a third of us believe that a diet absolutely free of fat—a nutrient, lest you forget, essential to our survival—would be better for us than a diet containing even just “a pinch” of it. In one experiment, he showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.” (Oh, yeah.) I think of Rozin as a kind of psychoanalyst of nutritionism.

A few years ago, Rozin presented a group of Americans with the following scenario: “Assume you are alone on a desert island for one year and you can have water and one other food. Pick the food that you think would be best for your health.”

The choices were corn, alfalfa sprouts, hot dogs, spinach, peaches, bananas, and milk chocolate. The most popular choice was bananas (42 percent), followed by spinach (27 percent), corn (12 percent), alfalfa sprouts (7 percent), peaches (5 percent), hot dogs (4 percent), and milk chocolate (3 percent). Only 7 percent of the participants chose one of the two foods that would in fact best support survival: hot dogs and milk chocolate.

Evidently some of the wreckage of the lipid hypothesis has washed up on Rozin’s desert island.

“Fat,” he writes, “seems to have assumed, even at low levels, the role of a toxin” in our dietary imaginations. I wonder why. As Rozin points out, “Worrying so much about food can’t be very good for your health.” Indeed. Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder not yet recognized by the DSM-IV, but some psychologists have recently suggested that it’s time it was. They’re seeing more and more patients suffering from “an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”

So this is what putting science, and scientism, in charge of the American diet has gotten us: anxiety and confusion about even the most basic questions of food and health, and a steadily diminishing ability to enjoy one of the great pleasures of life without guilt or neurosis.

But while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it’s important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets. All three helped to amplify the signal of nutritionism: journalism by uncritically reporting the latest dietary studies on its front pages; the food industry by marketing dubious foodlike products on the basis of tenuous health claims; and the government by taking it upon itself to issue official dietary advice based on sketchy science in the first place and corrupted by political pressure in the second. The novel food products the industry designed according to the latest nutritionist specs certainly helped push real food off our plates. But the industry’s influence would not be nearly so great had the ideology of nutritionism not already undermined the influence of tradition and habit and common sense—and the transmitter of all those values, mom—on our eating.

Now, all this might be tolerable if eating by the light of nutritionism made us, if not happier, then at least healthier. That it has failed to do. Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.