Against Calories. Against Nutritional Science.

I wrote this two weeks ago. It’s perhaps quite controversial so I decided not to post it. But now I’ve changed my mind and decided to post it anyway.

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At the end of the 19th century in Middletown, USA, Wilbur Atwater invented the food calorie. He did this by placing different foods in a sealed chamber, burning them and then recording how much heat they gave off. He then translated the temperature readings to a number of calories - the higher the temperature the greater the calories.

Fast forward to me this morning. I’m scrolling through instagram and some guy is telling me with conviction that I need to consume 2000 max-protein calories each day. He recommended the best way was to go to Tesco, buy some packaged cooked chicken, some vacuum sealed wraps and some energy bars. With this he then showed me how to prepare a meal-prepped plan for a week of chicken wraps and energy bars. He conveniently also tallied on screen the running sum of calories.

It would be wonderful if this garbage was just part of all the other garbage we all scrolled through this morning. But unfortunately calories are a foundational pillar of our modern food world. It’s what we learn at school and it’s part of the recommendations from the NHS.

As of 2022, the law in England requires large food businesses to display calorie information on their menus. What this means is that if you go into Mcdonalds, the government supports your health by making sure you know that the Big Mac has 509 Kcal. The industrially farmed beef, the pesticides, the hormones, the antibiotics, the preservatives, the cruelty, destruction and poison, is not important - what is important, is how much heat it will give off when it is burnt.

Provided you are a man, you could eat 4 Big Macs today and you will be at a “calorie deficit” from your 2500 recommended daily intake. However my friend, if you are a woman, I’m sorry to say that you unfortunately would be above your recommended 2000 calories. But don’t worry you can still eat 3.

The issue I have with calories is part of a much wider problem that modern science has created for food. It seems that we have never known more about the science of our food, but at the same time, we are eating worse than ever before. Growing up my Nonna and Nonno wouldn’t have had the faintest clue of a protein, a carbohydrate or a calorie, but they ate very well, and were much less fat and much less sick than us.

Not only do I believe that modern nutritional science hasn’t helped our diets, I in fact believe that it has degraded them. Nutritional science is a symptom of the human-centric disease that rejects nature - the same disease that led farming into N,P, K and pesticides.

As our food becomes a series of chemical compounds and energy stats, we forget about the two fundamental pillars of our food: ecology and culture. We forget our food can only be as good as the living ecosystems it has come from, and we forget our cultural wisdom of health and wellbeing.

Nutritional science has also helped the wrong people decide what we should eat. The majority of scientific food reports are funded by large food conglomerates to support their products’ success.

Why did Ancel Keys decide to convince us that animal fats were bad? So that we would buy margarine. And the only way they could convince people to replace the natural fats that we’ve eaten for thousands of years with this ultra-processed, hydrogenised soy bean oil from deforested rainforests, was to drown everyone in scary scientific noise that they couldn’t understand

“What actually is cholesterol?! What on earth is a polyunsaturated fat?! Who knows, but it sounds serious, so let’s listen to them!”.

I think food belongs outside the lab and that we need to focus on rekindling our relationship with the ecology and culture of food. I think instead of reading nutritional charts on packets of food, we should focus on knowing where it has come from, how it was grown and by whom. I believe the way we can regenerate the health of our diets is by re-learning the cultural wisdom and the ecological relationships of food.

If the past 50 to 75 years has been Science’s Food Movement, now it’s time for Nature’s Food Movement.

Matteo

05/04