Eat food, not nutrients

There's a really good article at the NYT by Michael Pollan (author of the Omnivore's Dilemna) called
Unhappy Meals. Its main thesis is that nutrition science, partly because of the influence of industry, has made us less healthy. Instead of concentrating on food, we now concentrate on Nutrients. So in 1977 an influential Senate Study came out and said we should cut down on red meat and dairy products because of their high saturated fat content. This freaked out those industries and they re-wrote the study to say we should eat meat and dairy products low in saturated fats.

from the article:

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

The article is long, but a really good read. Is this fixation on nutrients as opposed to food goo for us?

Again from the article:

Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 “Dietary Goals” — McGovern’s masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of the panel’s recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell’s and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet — indeed, many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.