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What Should We Eat? Biopolitics, Ethics, and Nutritional Scientism

  • Symposium: Scientism
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Abstract

Public health advocates, government agencies, and commercial organizations increasingly use nutritional science to guide food choice and diet as a way of promoting health, preventing disease, or marketing products. We argue that in many instances such references to nutritional science can be characterized as nutritional scientism. We examine three manifestations of nutritional scientism: (1) the simplification of complex science to increase the persuasiveness of dietary guidance, (2) superficial and honorific references to science in order to justify cultural or ideological views about food and health, and (3) the presumption that nutrition is the primary value of food. This paper examines these forms of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics to address bioethical concerns related to the misuse of scientific evidence to make claims regarding the effect of diet on health. We argue that nutritional scientism has ethical implications (i) for individual responsibility and freedom, (ii) concerning iatrogenic harm, and (iii) for well-being.

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Notes

  1. In the United States, the RDAs were regularly updated and published approximately every five years until the tenth and final edition (1989). After a longer-than-usual hiatus, the RDA publication was replaced by a more comprehensive approach: the dietary reference intakes (DRIs), which included not only the old RDA values but also additional values (estimated average requirement, EAR; adequate intake, AI; and tolerable upper intake level, UL). The last publication of the RDAs per se ran to only 283 pages, but the fourteen volumes of the DRIs total thousands of pages (Otten, Pitzi Helwig, and Meyers 2014). The first version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans was published in 1980, and this publication has been updated every five years since. At the time of writing, the current version is dated 2010 (United States Department of Agriculture and United States Department of Health and Human Services 2010). The first step in a revised version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans involves the constitution of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee, a group of nutrition scientists who meet regularly over about a year to consider the vast body of research available. Their task is to consider the strength of the evidence for conclusion statements about various relationships, classifying each as strong, moderate, or limited. The report of the advisory committee (the 2015 report has recently been released) is reviewed by a group affiliated with the USDA and DHHS (United States Department of Agriculture 2011). This group develops the actual Dietary Guidelines for Americans, taking into account whatever practical considerations are deemed appropriate and condensing and simplifying the original message as required.

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Mayes, C.R., Thompson, D.B. What Should We Eat? Biopolitics, Ethics, and Nutritional Scientism. Bioethical Inquiry 12, 587–599 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4

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