Nutritionism fads? I just find them hard to swallow

I'M IN love with a liberal foodie intellectual. Which is why my eye was drawn to the shiny front cover of the current edition of Timemagazine which promises to "Uncover the myths about food". Said article is very well researched and very well written but the money quote in the last paragraph comes down to "eat in moderation and get some exercise". That's €4.50 of my money I'll never see again.

It should keep us awake at night that the money spent on diet books in the US alone is enough to eradicate world hunger but it doesn’t and instead we’re left at the mercy of tomorrow’s newspaper headlines which, seemingly on a whim, will have it that red wine/dark chocolate/whatever will either give us cancer/cure us of cancer or prolong our life/shorten our life.

The Paleo diet is the new Atkins in the dieting industry. It argues that since the human genome first appeared during the Paleolithic era (an odd 2.6 million years ago) we are still genetically programmed only to eat the food that was available then. Lashings of fish, fresh fruits and non-starchy vegetables but no dairy, grains or legumes because they only appeared on mankind's menu some 12,000 years ago. The rocket and polenta brigade are currently in thrall to the Paleo (it's very Ab Fab) but they're either unaware or unconcerned by the fact that Paleo man had a life expectancy somewhere in his mid-30s and if a sabre-toothed tiger didn't get him then his woefully inadequate diet did.

The current object of my affection is Michael Pollan, a writer and activist whose 2008 book " In Defence Of Food: An Eater's Manifesto"is one of the most important non-fiction books you can ever hope to read in that it will sort you out nutritionally for life. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," reads the first sentence and you can put the book down there because that's all you really ever need to know.

Arguing that what we eat today isn’t real food but “an imitation of food” (hello there, supermarket ready meals) he warns not to eat anything our grandparents wouldn’t recognise as food. There go your Turkey Twizzlers.

But the most dazzling aspect of his writing is his clear-headed and cogent attack on that most dreadful of modern malaises: “nutritionism”. We are told by white-coated experts that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in food that determine its value. But Pollan argues that, since science doesn’t have a full understanding of how food affects the human body, nutritionism leads policymakers to make poor decisions about what we should and shouldn’t eat. The “high priests” of nutritionism (aka tabloid headline writers) can peddle their “Oranges-will-kill-you” nonsense under the cover of pseudo-science.

What did nutritionism ever do for us? Once it told us to use only margarine and never butter but then changed its mind. Later, it was all about low-fat foods so everyone ended up bingeing on carbs but then that fell foul of nutritional revisionism. The last gimmick out of nutritionism’s bag of tricks was Omega 3 which spread like a virus around supermarket aisles invading any product that hadn’t got its fists up.

If you really want to see nutritionism in its most pernicious form just pick up a box of children’s breakfast cereal. It’s basically just an oddly shaped collection of coloured sugar parcels but going on the counterattack the packet throws the terms thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B6, folic acid and vitamin B12 around to pacify the demands of spurious nutritionism.

Pollan simply says: “Don’t eat cereals that change the colour of the milk” and because his epigrams read like poetry to me, try these on for size: “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t”, “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car”, “Don’t eat any food that needs to be advertised on television”. And my all-time favourite: “It’s not food if it has the same name in all languages”. You have to think about that one for a while but once you alight on Big Mac and Pringles you can chuckle away to yourself.

Despite such lyrically expressed common sense, nutritionism hasn’t gone away you know and it’s currently working up a routine about a food product that most of us can’t spell, let alone have tried. Couscous sales in Ireland have dramatically increased over the last few months (admittedly from a very low base) and it’s now making a dash for that place in our supermarket basket that previously hosted sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. The place that loudly announces to other shoppers: “Look at me, I’m on trend”.

You read it here first – Couscous is the new pasta. It’s nutritionally correct in that it has a superior vitamin profile to pasta and a 25 per cent lower glycemic load. If you’re still awake it also has twice as much riboflavin, niacin and vitamin B6 and (goodness me) four times as much thiamine and antithetic acid as pasta. And if you’re not already out the door and on the way to Tesco to join the Cool Couscous Club here’s the real clincher: it only has a 1 per cent fat to calorie ratio whereas big slobby, fatty pasta has a 5 per cent ratio.

"Couscous Comes of Age," shouted a Daily Telegraphheadline from earlier this summer with the story noting that a product that was once buried at the back of an ethnic food shelf is now beginning to be given eye-level shelf space in high-street supermarket chains.

It’s got it all couscous – it pushes all the right healthy eating buttons, has good ethnic credentials and positions you the buyer as being an “early adapter” and “ahead of the curve” before it becomes all too hideously mainstream and you’ll be able to buy three packets for the price of two in Aldi.

I’ll be sitting out the couscous fad. Sure, it’s a natural foodstuff and is bursting with all sorts of nutritional goodness. But here’s the unpalatable truth about couscous: it tastes like 50-year-old cardboard.

And while I subscribe and am in thrall to every single rule that Michael Pollan has about food, I have a little one of my own: Don’t eat anything that tastes like cardboard. And yes, that includes you brown rice.

I will sit here quietly and wait for Angel Delight to become nutritionally fashionable.