How corporate nutrition science and food industry lobbying distort global diets—beyond individual choice
Original framing: “If you want to know how to think about healthy eating, read this book” — New Scientist
The historical manipulation of nutrition science by corporate actors—such as the sugar industry’s 1960s–70s funding of Harvard researchers to promote fat as the primary dietary villain—parallels today’s obfuscation of ultra-processed food harms. Gardner’s work, while scientifically grounded, ignores how dietary guidelines have been weaponized to serve industrial interests, from the UK’s 1940s promotion of margarine over butter to the modern push for 'flexible' diets that downplay regulatory scrutiny. The 2016 *JAMA* revelations about sugar industry collusion with researchers expose a pattern of corporate capture that persists in contemporary nutrition discourse.
The *New Scientist*’s framing of *Food Sense* as a neutral, individualistic guide to healthy eating obscures a web of power structures: corporate capture of nutrition science, historical manipulation of dietary guidelines, and the erasure of Indigenous and marginalized foodways.
Gardner’s work, while scientifically sound, aligns with a neoliberal paradigm that depoliticizes food access, ignoring how racial capitalism and colonial legacies shape dietary inequities. Cross-cultural examples—from Japan’s *washoku* to the Navajo *Diné* diet—demonstrate that nutrition is not a universal science but a culturally embedded practice tied to land, justice, and community. The trickster here is the illusion of choice in a system designed to profit from chronic disease, while solutions like food sovereignty policies and agroecological education offer pathways to restore agency and equity. Without addressing these systemic dimensions, 'healthy eating' remains a privilege of the Global North, masking the structural forces that determine who gets to eat well—and who doesn’t.