Food Studies
The Introduction of a New Paradigm
My Background
Since the year 2018, I’ve ventured into this odd space of nutritional science purely by chance. I went on an extremely restrictive diet when I was 17 to get rid of the stigma of being overweight, in that process I lost 100 pounds, but as a result, I developed an eating disorder.
In retrospect, my history of trauma and abuse did not add to my sense of good body image, my relationship with food has always been dysregulated, and I often turned to food as a coping strategy, but I digress.
In the meantime, I wanted to explore the relationship between nutrition and psychology as I was a fresh psych major in university. I wanted to see if what we ate had any influence on how we felt initially, then I pivoted to the stance that food and body were connected.
I followed people like Nicole LePera aka the holistic psychologist, and this lead me to follow a bunch of other new-age spiritual holistic people. At first, I was all in, accepting the idea that sugar was bad for you, celery juice would cure disease, and processed foods are toxic. But I always had an affinity for science, so I would question these claims and assumptions from an empirical perspective.
How do we know celery juice cures cancer? It seemed faulty to rely on personal experience when that didn’t reflect upon the personal experiences of other people and the more I looked into the topic the less I knew.
Then I began questioning the assumptions related to psychology, I began to see spiritual bullshit dressed up in psychological language. I realized psychology was a science and should be subjected to the methods of science. Part of that realization came from my mentor in college who is a behavioral neuroscientist, her constant stressing over empirical data and experimentation influenced me to see psychology not as an opinion but as a science.
From this realization I began to apply that same reasoning to nutrition, maybe nutrition should be science not a matter of opinion, intuition, and assumption. After this, I had some back-and-forth disagreements with those in my holistic nutrition/wellness circles. This pushback led me to find someone more up my alley, Dr. Layne Norton.
Layne literally changed my life, he affirmed exactly what I was striving for… a more objective understanding of nutrition from a scientific viewpoint. I literally fell in love with Layne’s content, his books, his products, and at one point I wanted to be him. I wanted a Ph.D. in nutrition, a coaching business, and to debunk bullshit online related to nutrition as part of my career. In my view, Layne was the physical embodiment of integrity in the health space. I cannot stress how important his influence has been to me and my work.
I once embodied what I feel like are the OG evidence-based nutrition values- men in their 30s and 40s who stress over randomized control trials related to topics like sports nutrition, had a liking for libertarianism, dislike this concept of “wokeness”, and fell into the narrative that it takes individual effort alone to change one’s health. But everything changed once covid happened.
Pretty soon my affinity for science and what it stood for was in stark contrast with the ideological beliefs of those I once looked up to. The concepts of “freedom”, “liberty”, and “choice” were thrown against science-based interventions for a deadly disease. Just like in the holistic wellness space, the evidence-based nutrition space soon let its ideological commitments cloud its understanding of public health and the science of it.
In my mind we were champions for knowledge, truth, empiricism, and objectivity- this is why we pushed against nutrition misinformation, the overemphasis of anecdotes, “feelings”, diet tribes, wokeness within nutrition, and more. However, some people in the space would ignore facts, would ignore data, and undermine the scientific enterprise they once lauded for their own ideology.
This realization shattered my worldview and was part of the reason I started talking about covid-19. I realized my understanding of the evidence-based space was faulty. Nevertheless, I soon ran into different problems such as… I didn’t enjoy studying public health outside of epidemiology, the harassment I was getting online took a toll, Instagram started attacking my account even though I was trying my best to give quality information, and there was a deep dissatisfaction I felt.
After a while, I just went back to talking about what everyone knew me for, nutrition, with some spunky elements of philosophy and psychology. But this wasn’t good enough for me.
Moving Forward
After chatting with and consuming the content of transdisciplinary intellectuals like Alan Flanagan and Danny Lennon, I began to see nutrition beyond its personal and sports implications. I started to see nutritional science from a broader perspective and working within public health solidified that for me.
Nutrition did have elements of policy, economics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Nutrition is a deeper field than just arguing over low versus high carb dieting or if vegetables are bad or not. What shapes people’s plates is not just the choices they make, but other factors often outside of their control.
This shift for me has been as radical as realizing nutrition IS a science. But I would argue nutrition is deeper than just its biological implications.
Nutrition is very much social, shaped by our personal relationships with others, our communities, and society at large.
Nutrition is also psychological, how we think about food and our relationship with it is behavioral and cognitive. This is where we see disordered eating and intuitive eating pop up.
But beyond just studying or caring about individual nutrients and their health implications for us, which largely encapsulates nutrition as a field, we should see how we eat not through the lens of food rather than nutrition.
Food Based Perspective
Nutritionism is a paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet. In more plain language, the point of eating is to promote bodily health via the nutrients that food contains.
However, this conception of food as a function of just the nutrients it contains is faulty. Nutrients do not exist in a vacuum and the emphasis on individual nutrients continues to plague nutritional science.
Nutrients contained in food are synergistic. The combination of vitamins, minerals, macros, and other substances work in tandem to lead to particular health outcomes.
We can also discuss the food matrix which is described as an assembly where complex physical and chemical interaction of nutrients and non-nutrients take place.
The argument is now made that the emphasis of nutritional research should be food and overall dietary patterns related to that food. Nutrients are not in isolation when consumed but are consumed in foods which can have varying impacts on the body and future health outcomes especially over time.
Focusing on food rather than individual isolated nutrients means looking at food not only from its biological implications but its social and psychological factors too.
Food Studies
Recently, a new field has emerged which attempts to look at food from multiple different lens outside of nutritional science. This field is called food studies.
Food studies critically examines food and its contexts within science, art, history, society, and other fields. This field is still new but it emphasizes the fact that food and our relationship with it is determined by sociological, ethical, psychological, agricultural, and historical factors.
This scholarly movement is slowly solidifying into an intellectual community that combines worldviews of the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities in building a unique perspective that examines agriculture and food through a systems approach by focusing on the network of sociopolitical relationships that extend “from farm to fork” (and beyond).
-Building a Food Studies Program: On-the-Ground Reflections from Syracuse University
Ultimately, this approach seeks to see food beyond its individual nutrients and those nutrients relation to health. This is a more “holisitic” approach which can address issues not related to nutrients directly, but food-based problems like food insecurity, food deserts, and food poverty.
Food studies can also address ethical considerations such as farming techniques, our consumption of animal products, our use of GMO technology, and more.
Food studies can also address cultural, economic, environmental, and public health considerations as well.
The reason why we want food studies rather than nutritional science to be the foundational lens by which we address human health related to food is its wider implications. While it can be argued that nutritional science can incorporate the aforementioned factors into its framework it starts from a narrow base.
Nutrition programs are often concerned with dietetics or the biological aspects of diet not necessarily the social or psychological factors let alone the other factors mentioned.
While nutrition as a science is deeper than its biological implications the core concern for many are not, what I dub, “macro” factors. The macro factors related to nutrition concern are production, consumption, attitudes, beliefs, understanding, systems, and behaviors around food.
This is distinct from the “micro” factors of nutrition which are metabolism, personalized diet, the relationship between nutrients and disease, nutrient timing, and sports nutrition.
My goal moving forward is to focus more on these macro factors related to nutrition by carving out and focusing on this emerging field of food studies. Food studies provides a wider base by which to explore various topics on the relationship between food and health.