Nutritionism

Clear and readable overview of food, diet, and what we do and don't know about it.

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World System:
It is an arithmetic of which too many of us are capable—casting our eyes over our plates and calculating under our breath the balance of carbohydrate, protein, calorie, and other nutritional values. The origins of this very modern, very capitalist grace are laid bare in Gyorgy Scrinis's important, iconoclastic, and long-awaited study. If you care about the nutritional content of your food, you should care about why you care. Nutritionism, in large doses, has the answers.

Julie Guthman, author of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism:
This book artfully brings together two fields. One is the huge body of scholarly and popular texts that provide nutritional advice, or tell us what to eat. Scrinis has combed through this literature in exhaustive detail to provide a magnificent synthesis. The other field is what I would call critical nutrition studies, referring to a growing literature that interrogates and historicizes nutritional advice. Scrinis critiques this on its own terms and then suggests other approaches to evaluating food.

David Jacobs, Mayo Professor of Public Health, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota:
Scrinis details the ideology of 'nutritionism,' in which the great majority of dietary advice is reduced to statements about a few nutrients. The resulting cascade is nutrient-based dietary guidelines, nutrition labeling, food engineering, and food marketing. I agree with Scrinis that a broader focus on foods would lead to quite a different scientific and political cascade, including a more healthful diet for many people and a different relationship between the public and the food industry.

Charlotte Biltekoff, University of California, Davis:
Nutritionism is an important contribution to the discourse of the alternative food movement, providing a unique, scholarly rationale for the food-quality paradigm. Gyorgy Scrinis provides a new language for talking about how our ideas about what makes a good diet have come to be.