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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #93: The low status of nutrition science

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This week's "food for thought" excerpt comes from Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We've Been Told About Food is Wrong  (2021), by Tim Spector, MD.

"The study of food and health nutrition is one of the newest sciences and only appeared in most countries from the 1970s in response to growth in the processed food industry and the desire for governments to advise on avoiding nutritional deficiencies. In most countries, nutrition is still not seen as the domain of medicine and the two areas of science rarely overlap, with few medics ever studying nutrition or vice versa, so the experience, methods, trials and errors made in testing pharmaceutical medicines and dealing with the food industry have not been fully shared with the nutrition scientists. Despite the fact that it wrestles with some of the most important questions of our time, academic nutrition is seen as one of the least glamorous or important areas of science. . . . [M]ost nutritional experts, with a few exceptions, remain isolated and feel unloved and undervalued by their universities and funding bodies, which are largely funded by the food industry. Instead of performing the clinical, large-scale studies we desperately need, they are forced to spend most of their time teaching or performing small-scale short-term studies on foods."