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The interconnections between food and medicine have long been a subject of interdisciplinary scholarship. Medical anthropologists, sociologists, and historians hold that an analysis of traditional and non-Western societies’ foodways can offer important insights into the social construction of illness and healing strategies. Yet, scholars also note that these linkages between food and medicine are dynamic, made and remade in the context of national liberation struggles, urbanization, and globalization. This article explores the contemporary promulgation of millets as ayurvedic medicine in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Drawing upon data gathered from key informant interviews and focal follows during six months of fieldwork between 2017–2020, it argues that millets are being prescribed as a pathway to an alternative modernity. Millets have become a site in which conceptualizations of authentic foodways and nutritionism are brought together to help reimagine both the definitions, and messy intersections, of food, medicine, illness and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contradictory dynamic in how Instagram seems to promote both profligate consumption habits in disregard of health and unprecedented health anxieties where people micromanage every ingredient they consume. Far from inhabiting disparate social worlds, these themes often coalesce within the same image. We argue that this phenomenon reflects consumers' attempts to navigate a neoliberal double bind that simultaneously pressures them toward both dysfunctional extremes. By emphasizing the centrality of a politics of indulgence to US ideological warfare, especially during the Green Revolution, we interrogate a key limitation of much critical food scholarship in its reductive equation of whiteness and power with food discipline and thinness. We draw on postcolonial scholarship on mestiza/o whiteness and code-switching to argue that neocolonial privilege is better understood as the mobility to code-switch between the vocabularies of discipline and indulgence without being confined to one or the other. Then, we analyze Instagram food posts taken by customers at organic restaurants in urban Philippines, reading them as innovative but never innocent contestations against the double binds of discipline/indulgence and mestiza/o whiteness while highlighting the rich historical and cultural contingency of their meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background As evidence grows about negative health impacts of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), nutrient-centred advice is contested, and food-based dietary guidelines are increasingly utilised. Previous analyses of dietary guidelines evaluated their potential impact on health and sustainability, but little research has been conducted to examine how the concept of UPFs is reflected in dietary advice for consumers. This paper systematically analyses whether and how UPFs are represented in dietary guidelines internationally.Methods Based on a systematic online search, the consumer-targeted key messages of 106 dietary guidelines were identified and a qualitative content analysis was conducted. A coding framework was developed to classify messages as ‘eat more’ or ‘eat less’ according to the language used (eg, ‘choose’ vs ‘avoid’) and to differentiate between a focus on nutrients or food processing. Specific foods mentioned in ‘eat less’ guidelines were classified according to their level of processing using the NOVA framework.Results 99% of guidelines utilised some type of nutrient-based message, either promoting ‘positive’ nutrients (eg, vitamins) or discouraging the consumption of ‘negative’ nutrients (mainly salt, sugar and fat). Explicit references to food processing were present in 45% of ‘eat less’ guidelines and 5% of ‘eat more’ guidelines. Implicit references (eg, promoting ‘raw’ or discouraging ‘packaged’ foods) were found in 43% of ‘eat less’ and 75% of ‘eat more’ guidelines. 53% of the specific foods referred to in ‘eat less’ advice were UPFs.Conclusion Overall, nutrient-based messages were more common than messages about processing levels. The majority of discouraged foods were UPFs, however some minimally processed foods were discouraged, which points to tensions and contradictions between nutrient- and processing-based dietary advice. As dietary guidelines begin to include advice about food processing, it is important to consider both consumer understanding of the terms used and their capacity to act on the advice.

Prompted by the increasingly promoted "plant-based" burgers available on the market, this paper interrogates their epistemological and ontological implications, and how these food products problematize the discursive category of "meat." Our analysis focuses on the promotional rhetoric of the "plant-based" meat company Beyond Meat; specifically, the Beyond Burger. Using the Beyond Burger, we address the scientific, technological, and socio-cultural bases upon which the concept of food functionality is rhetorically constituted and negotiated by public health officials, policy makers, and scientists. Ultimately, we argue that the Beyond Burger and other plant-based meats disrupt the established categorical boundaries of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treatment of a child diagnosed with an inherited metabolic disease is a demanding task both for the clinicians and for the parents. The metabolic pediatricians and dietitians have to deal with scarce and dispersed clinical knowledge, while the parents must actively participate in its treatment, the bulk of which consists of a stringent diet and managing the risk of metabolic decompensation or intoxication. In this article, I characterize the medical epistemologies of a particular kind of "metabolic living," discussing differences and similarities between the clinical/expert knowledge of metabolic specialists, and the lay knowledge of parents of affected children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As evidence grows about negative health impacts of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), nutrient-centred advice is contested, and food-based dietary guidelines are increasingly utilised. Previous analyses of dietary guidelines evaluated their potential impact on health and sustainability, but little research has been conducted to examine how the concept of UPFs is reflected in dietary advice for consumers. This paper systematically analyses whether and how UPFs are represented in dietary guidelines internationally. Methods: Based on a systematic online search, the consumer-targeted key messages of 106 dietary guidelines were identified and a qualitative content analysis was conducted. A coding framework was developed to classify messages as 'eat more' or 'eat less' according to the language used (eg, 'choose' vs. 'avoid') and to differentiate between a focus on nutrients or food processing. Specific foods mentioned in 'eat less' guidelines were classified according to their level of processing using the NOVA framework. Results: 99% of guidelines utilised some type of nutrient-based message, either promoting 'positive' nutrients (eg, vitamins) or discouraging the consumption of 'negative' nutrients (mainly salt, sugar and fat). Explicit references to food processing were present in 45% of 'eat less' guidelines and 5% of 'eat more' guidelines. Implicit references (eg, promoting 'raw' or discouraging 'packaged' foods) were found in 43% of 'eat less' and 75% of 'eat more' guidelines. 53% of the specific foods referred to in 'eat less' advice were UPFs. Conclusion: Overall, nutrient-based messages were more common than messages about processing levels. The majority of discouraged foods were UPFs, however some minimally processed foods were discouraged, which points to tensions and contradictions between nutrient- and processing-based dietary advice. As dietary guidelines begin to include advice about food processing, it is important to consider both consumer understanding of the terms used and their capacity to act on the advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Based on a case study of Washington State prison food policy and practice, this article traces the use of nutritionism as an enabling epistemology of mass incarceration in the neoliberal era in the United States. To develop this argument, the author develops the concept of carceral nutrition, or ideologies of food and eating that reduce complex relations of nourishment to biopolitical calculations of nutrition in the interests of discipline, punishment, control, and confinement. Under the pressures of neoliberal austerity, narrowly defined nutritionism ensures cheap sustenance and biopolitical control while maintaining a veneer of scientific legitimacy and liberal beneficence. This article also considers recent efforts to improve prison food through state-based reform and enhanced nutritional standards. These reforms, however, reinforce reductionary nutritionism and cede epistemic authority over "good" food to the carceral state. Drawing on the political theory of prison abolitionism, the author calls for non-reformist approaches to food justice that foster non-carceral relations of food and eating and support collective liberation and human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present findings from a community-based research project on school food environments in 50 elementary and high schools in a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. Our findings highlight that schools' privilege five intersecting domains in the school food environment: 1) health and nutrition; 2) food access; 3) education and food literacy; 4) environment and sustainability; and 5) the socio-cultural aspects of food. These results illustrate that the dominant discourses about school food mainly revolve around health, nutrition and food access, yet many of the K-12 principals also identified food literacy and learning about sustainable food systems and the environment, in addition to the relational or socio-cultural aspects of foods as important elements of their school food environments. This integrative approach to food extends our understanding of food beyond charity, and opens up conversations about food as a human right. Ouranalysis shows the need to go beyond a health or nutrition school food program and consider integrative food pedagogies which will promote social and environmental food justice in the school food environment.

Determining the amount of trophy in aquatic ecosystems is important because increasing the availability of nutrients is affectings all levels of aquatic ecosystems as well as changes in species abundance, migration, reduce in biodiversity and changes in the structure and composition of communities. Therefore, there should be a proper method for determining the trophy state or production in the ecosystem. The current methods for determining the amount of trophy are based on three physical, chemical and biological parameters. Pole-dokhtar County has 11 wetlands with 8 permanent and 3 seasonal wetlands and is known as the wetland city of Iran. In this research to assess the trophic status of 8 permanent Pole-dokhtar wetlands, monthly sampling were conducted in summer and winter of 2017 and the Carlsson Trophy Index (TSI) was used for calculation of total phosphoric (TP) concentration and total nitrogen (TN). The results showed the Lfanhe wetland 1 was in yotrophic conditions, the Lfanhe wetland 2 was in acute mesotrophy and other wetlands were located in mild mesotrophic nutrition in the summer. In the winter, due to the reduction of air temperature and consequently the decrease of evaporation and the increase in the input of surface and underground waters to wetlands, all of wetlands were in the mild mesotrophic conditions. Based on the average annual Carlson index, the Lfanhe 1 and Lfanhe 2 wetlands were in mesotrophic conditions and 6 wetlands were in mild mesotrophic conditions. Valiasr Natural Park wetlands with annual mean 42.3 characterized by mesotrophic conditions and Tang Fani wetlands with annual mean 34.08 was in the low mosotrothic conditions. In the Pole-Dokhtar wetlands, the annual suspended sediment load and water turbidity have increased due to the large amounts of sediment accumulation in the area, which eventually leads to the development of aquatic plants in the water surface and accelerates utrification of wetlands.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, the science and technologies of nutrition have influenced what we eat, how we eat, how we experience food, the role of food in society, and ultimately our health. Diet-related non-communicable diseases (DR-NCDs) have simultaneously proliferated around the world and especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Nations such as Nauru have some of the highest rates of DR-NCDs in the world, despite a long history of nutritional advice and intervention. In a context of improving scientific knowledge over the past century, why would DR-NCDs have continued to advance? The concept of 'nutritionism' provides a new way into thinking about this contradiction, as it challenges us to make sense of the work nutritional science does beyond changing the nutrients we ingest. Applying this concept to the Nauruan case shows how nutritional science can undermine other cultures' ways of engaging with food linguistically, socially and also experientially. It exposes the moral values that infuse nutritional science and the way they are experienced by local communities. It also shows how the ideology of nutritional science can be taken up more readily than specific dietary advice and be mobilized by others seeking to encourage profitable but nutritionally-unhealthy dietary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reasons that determine the behavior of food product consumers, but also of people in general, is one of the most complex issues in the marketing of companies and require extensive research, and the reason for this is the individuality and complexity of human. Knowing all the influencing factors grouped into determinants and discovering the correlations between them will lead to a wealth of information on the impacts and consumer behavior. Social platforms (networks) on the internet are very popular today, and information on nutrition, diet, gastronomy and eating habits is published on a daily basis. In recent years there has been a growing interest in food, nutrition and diets on social media (Livestiling, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), with gastro-blogs and influencers as channels used in marketing and influencing consumer behavior. The subject of the research in this paper is the theoretical development of a new methodology of the so-called "nutrition marketing", based on several principles (3P), focused on the importance of nutritional determinants, determinants of food quality and safety, as well as other important determinants that influence consumer behavior. Emphasizing these determinants and the benefits for people's health and well-being are part of the principles of Nutritional Marketing. As one of the concepts of Nutritional Marketing, a survey is included in the research for this paper on the impact of social platforms as a marketing tool on consumer behavior by detecting an impact determinant called social media. The analysis of the survey is supported by the creation of several statistical models, including a correlation analysis model and a model for distribution of patterns. The principles of nutrition marketing and the developed methodology will enable companies to create a successful food marketing strategy. The benefitс can be trifold: it will benefit companies insuring their higher profits, will benefit citizens by increasing their consumption of healthy, quality and safe food products, and ultimately, will benefit the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global industrial food system is increasingly recognised as a source of poor health that deepens social and economic inequity. Health advocates, policy makers, and food activists strive to improve nutrition and food access across racial and ethnic divides; however, given established approaches, they may miss fundamental pathways for improving health and justice comprehensively. While food access and nutrition are often identified as primary concerns for marginalised communities and the reason for food insecurity and food-related illness, critical food justice scholars use a more expansive lens to suggest a democratised food system is needed, and that solutions based solely in access to healthy food can undermine more systemic approaches. Our research extends this analysis, highlighting the importance of endemic food culture (foodways) as a tool for retaining identity, building community, and maintaining health among refugee populations in one community in Salt Lake City, Utah. Further, this work suggests that community engagement and expertise is essential in leveraging foodways such that marginalised communities can effectively resist cheap, unhealthy, and placeless calories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People around the world select their foods and meals according to particular choices based on physiological disorders and diseases, traditions, lifestyles, beliefs, etc. In this chapter, two of these particular alimentations are reviewed: those of the gourmet and the frail elderly. They take place in an environment where food is usually synonymous of body health disregarding its effects on social, cultural and psychological aspects, including emotions. Based on an extensive literature review, it is proposed that the paradigm changes from food equals health to food means well-being, the latter encompassing physical and physiological aspects as well as psychological, emotional and social aspects at the individual and societal levels. The growing food and nutrition requirements of an aging population are reviewed and special nutritious and enjoyable products available for this group are discussed. [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]

Transnational corporations (TNCs) have been important players in the globalization of food and agriculture. The preceding papers focused on the ways in which the modern food system is a result of the growing influence and global expansion of agrifood TNCs. Pat Mooney outlined the increasing concentration in agricultural input corporations, highlighting the environmental and health costs that result from their power and control. Jennifer Clapp described the latest changes in commodity trading firms, showing that the historically private nature and evolving horizontal and vertical integration in this sector, along with new players, have been damaging for the environment and livelihoods. She argues for increasing transparency and greater regulatory oversight. Finally, Gyorgy Scrinis explored the ways in which food and beverage manufacturing companies (‘Big Food’) are responding to concerns about the health impacts of their products by adopting forms of corporate nutritionism.

What nutrition buzzword is on the tip of more tongues than gluten? Today’s popular obsession with gluten, or gluten avoidance more precisely, has spurred a bevy of gluten-free products and cookbooks with recipes for items such as cauliflower pizza crust. The Canadian market for gluten free products grew 26% between 2008 and 2012, and the sales for gluten-free foods in Canada has been estimated at upwards of $460 million despite the relatively low numbers of Canadians who require gluten free foods due to a diagnosis of Celiac disease (1%) or non-celiac gluten sensitivity (6%) (Agriculture and Agri-foods Canada, 2014). The most common reasons to avoid gluten given by those without a medical need to do so include “digestive health,” “nutritional concerns,” and “weight loss” (Agriculture and Agri-foods Canada, 2014). Calling Alan Levinovitz’s book, The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat timely is an understatement.

Public health advocates, government agencies, and commercial organizations increasingly use nutritional science to guide food choice and diet as a way of promoting health, preventing disease, or marketing products. We argue that in many instances such references to nutritional science can be characterized as nutritional scientism. We examine three manifestations of nutritional scientism: (1) the simplification of complex science to increase the persuasiveness of dietary guidance, (2) superficial and honorific references to science in order to justify cultural or ideological views about food and health, and (3) the presumption that nutrition is the primary value of food. This paper examines these forms of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics to address bioethical concerns related to the misuse of scientific evidence to make claims regarding the effect of diet on health. We argue that nutritional scientism has ethical implications (i) for individual responsibility and freedom, (ii) concerning iatrogenic harm, and (iii) for well-being. [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]

The Group of Eight Countries (G8) launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to improve nutritional outcomes through private sector involvement in agricultural development. The accession of Malawi to the Alliance reveals the assumptions behind the intervention. We show that while the New Alliance may seem to have little to do with nutrition, its emergence as a frame for the privatization of food and agriculture has been decades in the making, and is best understood as an outcome of a project of nutritionism. To highlight the failings of the approach, we present findings from the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative in northern Malawi, which has demonstrated success in combatting malnutrition through a combination of agroecological farming practices, community mobilization, women's empowerment and changes in intrahousehold gender dynamics. Contrasting a political economic analysis of the New Alliance alongside that of the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative shows the difference between a concern with the gendered social context of malnutrition, and nutritionism. We conclude with an analysis of the ways that nutrition can play a part in interventions that are inimical, or conducive, to freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This conversation is part of a special issue on ''Critical Nutrition'' in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section authors focus on the hegemony of reductionism and quantification in modern-day nutritional knowledge by discussing the historical foundations and ethical dimensions, as well as the scientific absences, in this knowledge. Reviewing various challenges to the energy balance model, they all suggest that the promotion of good nutrition is far from simple. Some authors also discuss why various ''invisible" nutrients and measures of good nutrition continue to hold so much sway in nutrition discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation is part of a special issue on ''Critical Nutrition'' in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section authors discuss the impoverishment of nutritionism as a way of knowing and engaging with food, highlighting how nourishment is not amenable to either simplification or standardization. Some call for alternate ways of knowing food, through revitalizing tradition and culture, for example, and some emphasize engaging food through the senses. One author is skeptical that these other ways of knowing food can address real nutritional deficiencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]