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This article analyzes lay people's use of nutritionistic discourse in written correspondence with the Swedish Food Agency, an authority responsible for dietary advice. Examining 60 food related written digital messages, we apply a critical discourse analysis to parse the lexical items and grammar people use when constructing "food" in scientific terms. The findings show how message writers place nutrients at the discursive center. Message writers' grammatical constructions instrumentalize food and eating. This is reinforced by the message writers' frequent use of terms that indicate preciseness, such as numbers and amounts. Messages therefore emphasize the what, but not the how, of eating, implying a focus on food as subject to regulation and control. As such, eating is discursively reduced to an act of ingesting nutrients that can be decontextualized and managed in isolation--as entities to increase or avoid separately. These discursive features preclude the conceptualization of food choice and eating as subjective experiences of feelings, taste, and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant research approach to both food insecurity and charitable meal provision is nutritionistic, deficit-orientated and ignores wider socio-economic issues. This reinforces existing power dynamics and overlooks the agency of people living food-insecure lives. We critique this dominant approach and draw on the everyday experiences of families facing food insecurity to ground an alternative approach that emphasises food as a social determinant of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experiment explored consequences of two common lay theories about the diet–disease link: nutrient-centrism, the belief that nutrients (e.g. potassium) are crucial to staving off disease, and whole-food centrism, the belief that whole foods (e.g. bananas), containing these nutrients in their natural context, are most beneficial. Depicting an individual’s diet in terms of nutrients rather than whole foods containing these nutrients reduced the perceived likelihood that the individual would experience leading diet-related diseases (e.g. heart disease, diabetes). Although nutrition experts increasingly emphasize the health benefits of natural whole foods, people nevertheless appear to privilege nutrients when estimating disease risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]