You probably know what a nutritionist is. A nutritionist is a kind of expert. Specifically, he’s the kind of expert who knows little or nothing about his chosen subject, but through a combination of hubris, lukewarm intelligence, and echo-chamber reinforcement, has come to believe that he knows a great deal, and should spread the benefits of his expertise among the great unwashed.
It wasn’t so long ago that Experts had to be … well, experts. They had to be frighteningly clever individuals who knew lots of stuff not just about their own subject, but a whole load of tangential subjects too. Experts on, say, space travel or bridge-building or marine ecology tend to inspire awe. Even if you can’t follow half of what they’re talking about, it’s abundantly clear that they do know what they’re talking about.
All that changed somewhere around the late 70s. I won’t put an exact date on it, but it corresponded with a general government enthusiasm for herding everyone into universities, and thence to “STEM” jobs. Everyone wanted an -ology, as mocked by a certain British advertisement from 1987. And today, lo and behold, lots of completely unsuitable people now have a degree in “science”. Nutrition was one of those newfangled subjects which you could take if you weren’t smart enough to be a doctor or a physicist, but still wanted your -ology.
As you might expect, the subject of Nutrition relies less on the facts of biology and biochemistry – which are fiendishly hard to understand – and more on hearsay, rote-learning of stuff that someone made up, and what Richard Feynman called “cargo-cult science”: it looks like science and has sciency words in it, but it’s only “science” in the same sense that an airport control tower built from sticks and leaves and manned by a guy wearing bamboo headphones is an airport control tower.
The Anti-Nutritionist does not like this. He does not like nonsense masquerading as science. He likes it even less when it infiltrates public policy and brings entire nations to their squishy little knees – which is exactly what has happened.
It needs to stop. A blog isn’t going to make it stop, but it can shame those who are responsible, and perhaps offer an alternative view based on facts – or at least a view with a little more humility in the face of things we don’t entirely understand, and are not as simple as they seem.