Nutritionism replaced food with nutrients

Pollan names the ideology he's attacking nutritionism: the belief that food is essentially the sum of its nutrients, and that eating well means optimizing those nutrients rather than simply eating good food. Under nutritionism, a cookie fortified with fiber becomes "healthier" than an apple, because the cookie now has a nutrient claim printed on the box and the apple, silently, doesn't.

This sounds like science but is really a symptom of a food system that needs something to put on packaging. Whole foods can't easily make health claims — the FDA restricts what raw broccoli's label can say — so processed foods, which can be engineered and relabeled at will, gain an unearned nutritional halo simply by being legible to the nutrient framework.

The result is a grocery store full of foods that are nutritionally impressive and nutritionally incoherent — because a food is more than the vitamins scientists have currently identified in it.

Takeaway: distrust health claims on packaging; foods that need to boast rarely need to be eaten.