ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the three key nutrients of the quantifying era—protein, calories, and vitamins—and how a reductive focus and interpretation of these nutrients by scientists such as Liebig and Atwater, as well as by food and supplement companies and the lay public, established some of the central features of the nutritionism paradigm. The beginnings of nutrition science can be traced back to the "chemical revolution" in France in the late eighteenth century. The German organic chemist Justus von Liebig was the dominant figure in nutrition science for much of the nineteenth century. Protein was the celebrated nutrient of the nineteenth century, with meat considered a necessary source of the concentrated quantities of protein required for bodily growth and functioning. The food calorimeter was a nutritional technology for quantifying the energy contained in foods and the rate at which this energy was expended in the body.
