Through an engaging investigation into such issues as the butter versus margarine debate, and the battle between low-fat, low-carb, and other weight-loss diets, Scrinis builds a revealing history of the scientific, social, and economic factors driving society's modern fascination with nutrition.

Nutritionism is an important contribution to the discourse of the alternative food movement, providing a unique, scholarly rational 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. -- Charlotte Biltekoff, University of California, Davis Gyorgy 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. -- David Jacobs, Mayo Professor of Public Health, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota This book artfully brings together two fields. One is the huge body of both scholarly and popular texts that provide nutritional advice -- or tell us what to eat. Using this literature as data, 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. The author critiques the "what to eat" advice on its own terms and then suggests other approaches to evaluating food. -- Julie Guthman, University of California at Santa Cruz and author of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism It's an arithmetic of which too many of us are capable -- to cast our eyes over our plates and calculate under our breath the balance of carb, protein, calorie and other nutritional values. The origins of this very modern, very capitalist Grace are laid bare in Gyorgy Scrinis' 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. -- Raj Patel, Author of The Value of Nothing and Stuffed & Starved

List of Abbreviations1. A Clash of Nutritional Ideologies2. The Nutritionism Paradigm: Reductive Approaches to Nutrients3. The Era of Quantifying Nutritionism: Protective Nutrients4. The Era of Good- and-Bad Nutritionism: Bad Nutrients and Nutricentric Dietary Guidelines5. The Macronutrient Diet Wars: From the Low-Fat Campaign to Low-Calorie6. Margarine, Butter, and the Trans-Fats Fiasco7. The Era of Functional Nutritionism: Functional Nutrients8. Functional Foods: Nutritional Engineering9. The Food Quality Paradigm: Alternative Approaches to Food and the Body10. After NutritionismAcknowledgmentsAppendix: The Nutritionism and Food Quality LexiconNotesIndex