ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces and examines some of the general characteristics and limitations of the nutritionism paradigm. Nutrition scientists have given people great insights into the nature and health effects of foods and food components. Engaging with food at the level of nutrients can be described as a more abstract way of encountering food since it involves a less embodied level of engagement. Nutrient-level reductionism—and the nutritionism paradigm in general—is where the nutrient level becomes the dominant level of understanding food, such that this level does not merely inform and complement but instead tends to undermine, displace, and even contradict other levels and other ways of understanding and contextualizing the relationship between food and the body. The tendency to prematurely interpret an association between nutrients, foods, or biomarkers and health conditions as a one-to-one, cause-and-effect, deterministic relationship can be referred to as nutritional determinism.
