A Cal-Berkeley journalism professor, writing in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, has crafted a devastating critique of political correctness in dietary guidance. Michael Pollan's "Unhappy Meals " argues that replacement of advice to select a politically-correct (though ever-changing) balance of nutrients in lieu of basing a healthy diet on food choices has led to "cognitive dissonance" among shoppers and a deterioration of food choices -- all in the name of good science. It may be the best analysis of nutrition policy since Gary Taubes, whom Pollan cites reverently.

He laments "the rise of nutritionism":

The first thing to understand about nutritionism -- I first encountered the terms in the work of an Australian sociologist of science names Gyorgy Scrinis -- is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the "ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture.

But the problem is not confined to the consumer: "... if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist," says Pollan crediting anti-agribusiness activist and New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle with the insight that "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of the diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."

Why? Because what is the the "soul" of a particular food -- even if one head of broccoli is presumed identical to all others of its genus -- is unknown, perhaps unknowable. Looking where the light is brightest, scientists study nutrients, substances they can isolate and measure. The process of considering them in isolation, however, Pollan faults with producing dangerously misleading science. He offers this example: societies that eat a lot of meat have more coronary heart disease and cancers. Perhaps that's because their substitution of lots of fruits and vegetables leaves little room in their diet for meats rather than the nutritionism conclusion that there is something inherently unsafe about the meat itself. That, he posits, is why the Women's Health Initiative failed to discover a relationship between reducing fat intake and reducing heart disease and cancer. He also lambasts use of dietary recall as garbage-in, garbage-out data.

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that's exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. (emphasis added)

Moving towards a prescriptive conclusion, Pollan continues:

Looking at eating through this ecological lens opens a whole new perspective on exactly what the Western diet is: a radical and rapid change not just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century but also in our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. the ideology of nutritionism it itself part of that change.

He identifies four large-scale changes: 1) moving from whole foods to refined, 2) simplification of the food chain through standardization of seeds and fertilizers, 3) shifting from eating leaves to seeds, and 4) the shift caused by agri-business industrialization which has displaced "traditional food cultures."

Moving "beyond nutritionism," Pollan observes that "To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with nutritionism." He misses a great opportunity to identify government-mandated nutrition labels on food as a prime culprit (with one exception -- stay tuned). His nine rules of better eating: 1) "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (moms are hopelessly contaminated), 2) "Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims" (there, the exception!) -- here he notes disapprovingly that "The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement", 3) "Especially avoid food products containing ingredietns that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more htan five in number -- or that contain high-fructose corn syrup", 4) shop at farmers' markets, not supermarkets, 5) "Pay more, eat less," 6) "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves," 7) "Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do....", 8) Cook and, if possible, plant a garden, and 9) "Eat like an omnivore" by adding new foods for a more varied diet.

Regular consumers of McDonald's Happy Meals won't find a lot of comfort, but, then, that's part of our problem in making nutrition policy: to allow nutritionism's ideologists to define as good science anything that takes an easy shot at popular whipping boys like fast food. We deserve better. We need to demand more rigorous and encompassing dietary guidelines. We need to eat what our grandmothers told us was healthy. They were right.

Pollan's article should be required reading for every member of the next Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.