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Fermentating Trans Care
Published in Phillip Joy, Megan Aston, Queering Nutrition and Dietetics, 2023
Before continuing this line of thought, it is worth exploring its potential foreclosure by nutritional science and biomedicine. Nutritionism is a term deployed by Scrinis (2017) to describe the nutritional reductionism that has come to dominate scientific, and often popular, understandings of food. At its core is the notion that food can be reduced to biochemical constituents that act distinctly upon the body. Missing is relationality: how nutrients interact with each other and with the body; the body itself is always “situated” and biosocially contingent (see: Lock, 2017); the biosocial contexts in which food is actually consumed; the animacy of the food itself, or rather its own history of biosocial contingency; and the meanings given to foods by individuals, communities and peoples. In The Weight of Obesity, Yates-Doerr (2015) offers insight into how nutritionism operates in practice. She highlights how nutritionists in Guatemala define foods as “good” or “bad” to create a prescriptive map for weight loss. Yet the vicissitudes of everyday life complicate the simplicity of such a mapping process, which at its core, assumes that weight is a direct consequence of individualized choice. Fresh vegetables are encouraged, but the high presence of pathogens in the water supply wards against their use. One woman surprised clinicians when she admitted to adding vast amounts of sugar to her coffee as it was fortified with vitamin D, a substance deemed “healthy” in consultations. For many, the prescriptivism with which foods were assigned value, contrasted heavily with a culture of communal eating that was not orientated around medicalized understandings of health. Failure to adhere to nutritional advice was not a matter of ignorance or non-compliance but rather the failure of the nutritionism paradigm to account for the complexities of living.
Perceptions of weight in relation to health, hunger, and belonging among women in periurban South Africa
Published in Health Care for Women International, 2019
An approach focused on education and choice also assumes a very high level of confidence in nutrition science, and in both the causes and health implications of obesity. a confidence that Scrinis (2008) cogently critiques in his work on nutritionism. Indeed, there is growing awareness of the sheer complexity of diet-related noncommunicable disease risk: the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHAD) (Deboer et al., 2012; Yajnik et al., 2003) microbiome (Turnbaugh et al., 2006) and epigenetics literatures (Heerwagen, Miller, Barbour, & Friedman, 2010) all represent rapidly developing fields that highlight the disproportionate susceptibility of certain populations to both obesity and noncommunicable diseases like diabetes and hypertension.