Nutrition: the new world map

Abstract

The map of nutrition, evident in the structure of any course or textbook, derives from theses that framed a science begun in the 1840s, developed until the 1940s, and consolidated until now. Nutritionists now are as perplexed as the explorers of half a millennium ago, who continued to use maps that did not fit the wider world they found. Until the 1600s, alternatives to Ptolemaic cosmology remained unthinkable despite its obvious inadequacy, because it was of a universe with the earth, and man made in the divine image, at its centre. Nutritionists now are inhibited for similar reasons. Two determining principles of nutrition science, the identification of health with growth and the belief that animal food is superior to plant food, have a deep origin; they derive from the materialist ideology that asserts a manifest destiny of humans to exploit and consume the living and natural world. In response, a new nutrition is emerging, with a global perspective, whose ideology places humans within nature, and whose theses make a wider frame, able to fit the world as we can discern it now. The new nutrition gives equal value to personal, population and planetary health, with all that implies, including the concept that the world is best perceived as a whole. The Copernican revolution changed the meaning of movement on earth. The new nutrition can change the meaning of life on earth. Now is the time to draw its map.