ABSTRACT
The challenge for nutrition experts is to carry out and interpret scientific research into nutrients, foods, and dietary patterns in a manner that avoids the decontextualization, oversimpliflication, exaggeration, and hubris that have characterized the nutritionism paradigm. Nutritional epidemiologist David Jacobs has been interrogating the limitations of nutricentric scientific research over the past decade and is particularly critical of the overwhelming focus of nutrition research on single nutrients and its failure to account for the possible synergies among nutrients found in the "food matrix" of whole foods. From the perspective of the food quality paradigm, more research should focus directly on the evaluation of ingredients, foods, and dietary patterns in terms of the levels of processing, and particularly the many synthetic chemicals and technologically transformed and degraded ingredients in the food supply. Since the 1980s, government authorities and experts have also issued ample food-level guidance, such as in the form of the Food Guide Pyramid.
