Nonsense and non-science in nutrition.

A few years ago Reader’s Digest gave an account of the hazards of food. It was a tongue in cheek approach and suggested, for example, that milk on the cereal at breakfast would lead to coronary artery disease, that the bacon contained nitrosamines which would produce cancer, that the coffee was atherogenic and that the sugar added to it and to the cereal was responsible for all manner of ills. The article continued in a similar vein for lunch and dinner. This account highlighted the nonsense and non-science in nutrition and put nutrition and the nutritionist in a rather unflattering light. Though this article was published a while ago the same sort of nonsense is still being put out today by what I would call ‘pop’ nutritionists. I would define a ‘pop’ nutritionist as one who capitalizes on peoples’ fears and hopes, and these individuals and quasi-professional organizations must bear a heavy responsibility for the wide range of nutritional nonsense and non-science that is currently directed at the man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Before discussing the issue any further I think it is germane to the title of this talk to consider whether, in fact, nutrition is a science. The Oxfmd English Dictiona y defines science as ‘the state or fact of knowing’ and it is this definition that I shall be using. Nutrition is certainly not a pure science in its own right if considered under the general heading of, for example, physical science, chemical science or biological science. Rather it is a subsection of biological science and perhaps what makes nutritional science, as compared with physiological science, for example, more open to the brick-bats of others is that it is a science with popular appeal and it is not self-contained, but uses and applies the more rigidly defined disciplines of biochemistry, physiology, etc. Nutrition is a science, not a discipline, as it applies knowledge and techniques from other areas. It tends to consider the whole organism rather than individual cells or their components and is therefore of special interest and relevance to those whose main concern is man or the whole animal.