ABSTRACT
Margarine has been the chameleon of manufactured food products, able to transform its nutritional appearance, adapt to changing nutritional fads, and charm unwitting nutrition experts and nutrition-conscious consumers. The trans -fat fiasco is one of a number of cases of revisions and back-flips in scientific knowledge and dietary advice that have contributed to the common public perception that nutritional advice is constantly changing. These revisions include advice regarding dietary cholesterol, eggs, low-fat diets, and beta-carotene supplements. A key characteristic of nutritional reductionism has been that nutrition scientists' understanding of nutrients has been systematically decontextualized. Nutrition science has for much of its history been preoccupied with studying the naturally occurring nutrients found in whole foods, rather than the highly processed and novel foods and food components that have proliferated over the past century. Food manufacturers construct a nutritional facade around a food product, a facade for advertising some of the nutrients in the food product.
