How the food, drug, and supplement industries have taken advantage of the field of nutrition’s reductionist mindset
Reductionism and the Deficiency Mentality
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Research in human nutrition over the past 40 years has led to numerous discoveries, and to a comprehensive understanding of the exact mechanisms behind how food nutrients affect our bodies. However, the epidemics of diet-related chronic diseases—obesity, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, stroke, and cancers—dramatically increase worldwide, year after year.
Why hasn’t all this intricate knowledge translated into improvements in public health? Maybe it has to do with our entire philosophy of nutrition, called reductionism, where everything is broken down into its constituent parts, where food is reduced to a collection of single compounds with single effects. The reductionist approach has traditionally been, and continues today as, the dominant approach in nutrition research. For example, did you know that mechanistically, there’s a chemical in ginger root that down-regulates Phorbol Myristate Acetate (PMA)-induced phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and JNK MAP kinases? That’s actually pretty cool—but not while millions of people continue to die of diet-related disease.
We already know that three-quarters of chronic disease risk—diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, or cancer—can be eliminated if everyone follows four simple practices: not smoking, not being obese, half an hour of exercise a day, and eating a healthier diet—defined as more fruits, veggies, and whole grains, and less meat. Think what that would mean in terms of the human costs. We already know enough to save millions of lives. So, shouldn’t our efforts be spent implementing these changes before another dollar is spent figuring out whether there is some grape skin extract that can lower cholesterol in Zebrafishes, or even whole foods for that matter? Why spend taxpayer dollars clogging the arteries of striped minnows by feeding them a high cholesterol diet to see if hawthorn leaves and flowers have the potential to help? Even if they did, and even if it worked in people, too, wouldn’t it be better to just not clog your arteries in the first place?
This dramatic drop in risk, this increase in healthy life years through preventive nutrition, need not involve superfoods, or herbal extracts, or nutritional supplements—just healthier eating. When Hippocrates said something like, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food,” he didn’t mean that foods are drugs, but rather that the best way to remain in good health is to maintain a healthy diet.
Whereas, the historical attitude of the field of nutrition may be best summed up by the phrase, “Eat whatever you want after you have eaten what you should.” In other words, eat whatever you want, as long as you get your vitamins and minerals: a mindset epitomized by breakfast cereals, providing double-digit vitamins and minerals. But the road to health is not paved with Coke plus vitamins and minerals. This reductionistic attitude is good for the food industry, but not actually good for human health—because if food is just good for a few nutrients, then you can get away with selling vitamin-fortified Twinkies.
We need to shift from the concept of just getting adequate nutrition, to getting optimal nutrition: not just avoiding scurvy, but promoting health, and minimizing our risk of developing degenerative diseases.
Bringing things down to their molecular components works for drug development, discovering all the vitamins, and curing deficiency diseases. But in the field of nutrition, the reductionist approach is beginning to reach its limits. We discovered all the vitamins more than a half century ago. When’s the last time you heard of someone coming down with scurvy, pellagra, or kwashiorkor—the classic deficiency syndromes? What about the diseases of dietary excess: heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension—ever heard of anyone with any of those? Yet, we continue to have this deficiency mindset when it comes to nutrition.
When someone tries to reduce their consumption of meat, the first question they get asked is “Where are you going to get your protein?” rather than “Wait a second, if you start eating like that, where are you going to get your heart disease from?” The same deficiency mindset led to the emergence of a multibillion dollar supplement industry. What about a daily multivitamin just as insurance against nutrient deficiency? Better insurance would be to just eat healthy food.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Katie Schloer.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- M Messina, J W Lampe, D F Birt, L J Appel, E Pivonka, B Berry, D R Jacobs Jr. Reductionism and the narrowing nutrition perspective: time for reevaluation and emphasis on food synergy. J Am Diet Assoc. 2001 Dec;101(12):1416-9.
- A Fardet, E E Rock. Toward a new philosophy of preventive nutrition: from a reductionist to a holistic paradigm to improve nutritional recommendations. Adv Nutr. 2014 Jul 14;5(4):430-46.
- I Hoffman. Transcending reductionism in nutrition research. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 Sep;78(3 Suppl):514S-516S.
- D R Jacobs Jr, M D Gross, L C Tapsell. Food synergy: an operational concept for understanding nutrition. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 May;89(5):1543S-1548S.
- A Barnhill. Nutritionism, commercialization and food comment on "buying health: the costs of commercialism and an alternative philosophy". Int J Health Policy Manag. 2013 Sep 14;1(3):223-5.
- B Haughton, J D Gussow, J M Dodds, J.M.An Historical Study of the Underlying Assumptions for United States Food Guides from 1917 through the Basic Four Food Group Guide.
- P Riso, L Soldati. Food ingredients and supplements: is this the future? J Transl Med. 2012 Nov 19;10:227.
- E K Radhakrishnan, S V Bava, S S Narayanan, L R Nath, A K Thulasidasan, E V Soniya, R J Anto. [6]-Gingerol induces caspase-dependent apoptosis and prevents PMA-induced proliferation in colon cancer cells by inhibiting MAPK/AP-1 signaling. PLoS One. 2014 Aug 26;9(8):e104401.
- E S Ford, M M Bergmann, J Kröger, A Schienkiewitz, C Weikert, H Boeing. Healthy living is the best revenge: findings from the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition-Potsdam study. Arch Intern Med. 2009 Aug 10;169(15):1355-62.
- J Y Kim, J H Hong, H K Jung, Y S Jeong, K H Cho. Grape skin and loquat leaf extracts and acai puree have potent anti-atherosclerotic and anti-diabetic activity in vitro and in vivo in hypercholesterolemic zebrafish. Int J Mol Med. 2012 Sep;30(3):606-14.
- R M Littleton, M Miller, J R Hove. Whole plant based treatment of hypercholesterolemia with Crataegus laevigata in a zebrafish model. BMC Complement Altern Med. 2012 Jul 23;12:105.
- K Stoletov, L Fang, S H Choi, K Hartvigsen, L F Hansen, C Hall, J Pattison, J Juliano, E R Miller, F Almazan, P Crosier, J L Witztum, R L Klemke, Y I Miller. Vascular lipid accumulation, lipoprotein oxidation, and macrophage lipid uptake in hypercholesterolemic zebrafish. Circ Res. 2009 Apr 24;104(8):952-60.
Image thanks to KERBSTONE via Pixabay
Research in human nutrition over the past 40 years has led to numerous discoveries, and to a comprehensive understanding of the exact mechanisms behind how food nutrients affect our bodies. However, the epidemics of diet-related chronic diseases—obesity, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, stroke, and cancers—dramatically increase worldwide, year after year.
Why hasn’t all this intricate knowledge translated into improvements in public health? Maybe it has to do with our entire philosophy of nutrition, called reductionism, where everything is broken down into its constituent parts, where food is reduced to a collection of single compounds with single effects. The reductionist approach has traditionally been, and continues today as, the dominant approach in nutrition research. For example, did you know that mechanistically, there’s a chemical in ginger root that down-regulates Phorbol Myristate Acetate (PMA)-induced phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and JNK MAP kinases? That’s actually pretty cool—but not while millions of people continue to die of diet-related disease.
We already know that three-quarters of chronic disease risk—diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, or cancer—can be eliminated if everyone follows four simple practices: not smoking, not being obese, half an hour of exercise a day, and eating a healthier diet—defined as more fruits, veggies, and whole grains, and less meat. Think what that would mean in terms of the human costs. We already know enough to save millions of lives. So, shouldn’t our efforts be spent implementing these changes before another dollar is spent figuring out whether there is some grape skin extract that can lower cholesterol in Zebrafishes, or even whole foods for that matter? Why spend taxpayer dollars clogging the arteries of striped minnows by feeding them a high cholesterol diet to see if hawthorn leaves and flowers have the potential to help? Even if they did, and even if it worked in people, too, wouldn’t it be better to just not clog your arteries in the first place?
This dramatic drop in risk, this increase in healthy life years through preventive nutrition, need not involve superfoods, or herbal extracts, or nutritional supplements—just healthier eating. When Hippocrates said something like, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food,” he didn’t mean that foods are drugs, but rather that the best way to remain in good health is to maintain a healthy diet.
Whereas, the historical attitude of the field of nutrition may be best summed up by the phrase, “Eat whatever you want after you have eaten what you should.” In other words, eat whatever you want, as long as you get your vitamins and minerals: a mindset epitomized by breakfast cereals, providing double-digit vitamins and minerals. But the road to health is not paved with Coke plus vitamins and minerals. This reductionistic attitude is good for the food industry, but not actually good for human health—because if food is just good for a few nutrients, then you can get away with selling vitamin-fortified Twinkies.
We need to shift from the concept of just getting adequate nutrition, to getting optimal nutrition: not just avoiding scurvy, but promoting health, and minimizing our risk of developing degenerative diseases.
Bringing things down to their molecular components works for drug development, discovering all the vitamins, and curing deficiency diseases. But in the field of nutrition, the reductionist approach is beginning to reach its limits. We discovered all the vitamins more than a half century ago. When’s the last time you heard of someone coming down with scurvy, pellagra, or kwashiorkor—the classic deficiency syndromes? What about the diseases of dietary excess: heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension—ever heard of anyone with any of those? Yet, we continue to have this deficiency mindset when it comes to nutrition.
When someone tries to reduce their consumption of meat, the first question they get asked is “Where are you going to get your protein?” rather than “Wait a second, if you start eating like that, where are you going to get your heart disease from?” The same deficiency mindset led to the emergence of a multibillion dollar supplement industry. What about a daily multivitamin just as insurance against nutrient deficiency? Better insurance would be to just eat healthy food.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Katie Schloer.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- M Messina, J W Lampe, D F Birt, L J Appel, E Pivonka, B Berry, D R Jacobs Jr. Reductionism and the narrowing nutrition perspective: time for reevaluation and emphasis on food synergy. J Am Diet Assoc. 2001 Dec;101(12):1416-9.
- A Fardet, E E Rock. Toward a new philosophy of preventive nutrition: from a reductionist to a holistic paradigm to improve nutritional recommendations. Adv Nutr. 2014 Jul 14;5(4):430-46.
- I Hoffman. Transcending reductionism in nutrition research. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 Sep;78(3 Suppl):514S-516S.
- D R Jacobs Jr, M D Gross, L C Tapsell. Food synergy: an operational concept for understanding nutrition. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 May;89(5):1543S-1548S.
- A Barnhill. Nutritionism, commercialization and food comment on "buying health: the costs of commercialism and an alternative philosophy". Int J Health Policy Manag. 2013 Sep 14;1(3):223-5.
- B Haughton, J D Gussow, J M Dodds, J.M.An Historical Study of the Underlying Assumptions for United States Food Guides from 1917 through the Basic Four Food Group Guide.
- P Riso, L Soldati. Food ingredients and supplements: is this the future? J Transl Med. 2012 Nov 19;10:227.
- E K Radhakrishnan, S V Bava, S S Narayanan, L R Nath, A K Thulasidasan, E V Soniya, R J Anto. [6]-Gingerol induces caspase-dependent apoptosis and prevents PMA-induced proliferation in colon cancer cells by inhibiting MAPK/AP-1 signaling. PLoS One. 2014 Aug 26;9(8):e104401.
- E S Ford, M M Bergmann, J Kröger, A Schienkiewitz, C Weikert, H Boeing. Healthy living is the best revenge: findings from the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition-Potsdam study. Arch Intern Med. 2009 Aug 10;169(15):1355-62.
- J Y Kim, J H Hong, H K Jung, Y S Jeong, K H Cho. Grape skin and loquat leaf extracts and acai puree have potent anti-atherosclerotic and anti-diabetic activity in vitro and in vivo in hypercholesterolemic zebrafish. Int J Mol Med. 2012 Sep;30(3):606-14.
- R M Littleton, M Miller, J R Hove. Whole plant based treatment of hypercholesterolemia with Crataegus laevigata in a zebrafish model. BMC Complement Altern Med. 2012 Jul 23;12:105.
- K Stoletov, L Fang, S H Choi, K Hartvigsen, L F Hansen, C Hall, J Pattison, J Juliano, E R Miller, F Almazan, P Crosier, J L Witztum, R L Klemke, Y I Miller. Vascular lipid accumulation, lipoprotein oxidation, and macrophage lipid uptake in hypercholesterolemic zebrafish. Circ Res. 2009 Apr 24;104(8):952-60.
Image thanks to KERBSTONE via Pixabay
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Title
Reductionism and the Deficiency Mentality
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Content URLDoctor's Note
This is an issue Professor Emeritus T. Colin Campbell wrote a Whole book about. I’m looking forward to doing many more videos on the topic.
Where do plant-eaters get protein from, though? Check out Do Vegetarians Get Enough Protein?
The concept of optimal, rather than just adequate, nutrition is illustrated well in this video about fiber: Lose Two Pounds in One Sitting: Taking the Mioscenic Route.
Previous videos on reductionism include:
- Food Antioxidants and Cancer
- Treating Asthma With Plants vs. Supplements?
- Broccoli: Sprouts vs. Supplements
- Industry Response to Plants Not Pills
- Is the Fiber Theory Wrong?
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