For starters I don’t rule out any food because of its nutrient makeup. It’s like saying I won’t look at a painting, because it has pink in it, and pink is not a good color. It’s absurd. “Non fat,” “No sugar,” “low cholesterol,” and other such “No” foods are just as absurd. (Like I said, though, I should be nuanced and relaxed in my choices. There are exceptions to the “no’s”, but I’ll get into that in a bit.) Our bodies are designed to function best on a whole range of foods that contain all those “no” things. In fact, we need all those things, and in large amounts for a normal active body. There is good reason why we enjoy fat, sugar, and salt after all.

There are differences between foods, though, don’t get me wrong. When food is “designed” to hit pleasure centers, instead of being grown, prepared and cooked, it is probably overloaded with fat, sugar, or salt, and probably all three. When that happens, we then have to start thinking about where those nutrients are coming from, and how they ended up in our food. Unfortunately, the gift of food science that saved so many people a hundred years ago has now become the basis for a historically new food manufacturing industry.

When “fast” food (my name for anything that comes from a food scientist instead of a farmer then chef,) is developed, it is pieced together from individual nutrients. The manufacturers have broken all the bonds between compounds that make them food, so they can manipulate them into some product that satisfies a person’s emotional state, and not act as food. Fast food is about triggering satiation and pleasure, not about the whole experience of eating food.

The “no’s” that I avoid are actually the nutrient ingredients of manufactured products; things like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, sodium benzoate, etc. Those ingredients tell me that the item in hand is not, in fact, food in the natural sense. It may satisfy my desire for food, but it won’t provide my body with all the effects and benefits of food.

When all the “no’s” come in the form of actual food, they will always carry with them a rich variety of compounds, both in the form of vitamins and minerals, and a whole host of other compounds we don’t know much about. First, all that food interacts with our saliva, releasing aromas and flavors that can’t be reproduced by nutritional substance manufacturers. Then food provides a sensation of substance we relate to texture and fullness, and we feel it all the way down to the stomach. During digestion, all those compounds set off a chain of events that are so complex that it is impossible to know the whole process. What we do know ( through the good science that comes out of medical centers, not the “food” industry,) is that everything down to the shape of those compounds can have an effect on what our body does in response.

For example, sugar comes in a few different varieties, but in many shapes and combinations. Some of those combinations that come to us in natural fruits can pass straight into the blood, giving us a boost of energy and brain power. Other forms are incredibly tough to digests, and require special enzymes to digest like lactose. Others still, like the artificially products coming from high-fructose corn syrup, can’t be metabolized at all until it gets well into our digestive system, and then it trigers a chemical switch that causes us to store it as raw fat calories regardless of whether we need the sugar boost or not.

Sugar is one of the best know compounds and simplest to understand, so now imagine all those other more complex things we eat like amino acids (the building blocks of protein) carotenoids, and alkaloids (think caffeine, and the thousands of compounds that are very similar, affecting the nervous system in a range of ways.) Never mind all the other celluloids, lipids and complex organic molecules out there. The list is endless, and the combinations even longer. Our bodies are designed for them as much they are for us, and no nutrient break down will compensate or explain much of it.

So the next time you catch yourself talking about, or considering the nutrients of your food or nutritional products, tell yourself that in reality, even the most informed “you” has no real idea what you are talking about. Even the highly trained college educated nutritionists, and food scientists out there don’t have a clue about the complex nature of most “good” foods either. (Obviously if you have a medical condition, there may be specific things you need to avoid to make sure your drugs work, but in general this holds.)

When we have problems with the things we eat, they can usually be traced to the non-food things we eat like junk food, supplements and industrialized products, not the actual food we eat. More likely, these problems are just a result of eating too much, period. Real foods like fruit, whole non-industrialized grains, vegetables, and properly raised meats and dairy affect us in more profound ways than simple nutrient reactions. They buffer the bad things, and let our metabolisms do their good work. They drive our biologies and let us feel it working. The complex nature of real food is what makes eating so rewarding for us.

As Pollen described so famously in Omnivore’s Dilema, we need some basis for what is good to eat, or we will eat anything that is food-like. It is our omnivore’s dilema to figure out what is good to eat. We fill in that need with nutrient info, and “expert scientific” advice, but traditionally we as people have had other ways to learn those lessons. From history, we’ve learned that when we eat and drink whole, or fermented foods in small amounts together in groups of loved ones we become healthier. When we are active in mind and body, and know how much food we need for that lifestyle, our lives become healthier. Well grown, well prepared, and well cooked food, generates well people.

As the holiday season fades in a few weeks, and a new year faces us, many will set out, either through resolution, or just looks in the mirror, to cut back on calories, do more exercise, lose some weight, or more generally just get healthy. But what does “healthy” really mean when it comes to food and our behaviors?

For most of us, health is a rather elusive state that seems to shift out from under us every few months. This is because we don’t know what it is. As a result, media, marketers and our own psyches play tricks on us to make us feel we are lacking that missing ingredient in our health.

For people with chronic illness, lack of pain might be the ideal “healthy.” For the terminal patient, another few months of just being alive could be all the health he or she wants. In my twenties health was all about being able to play a full game of soccer, or climb up a rock gym. There is also a whole other way of thinking that describes health as a mental state of well being. In the end, health is a fairly relative term that varies from person to person, and moment to moment. I think we can all get a handle on it, though, if we do some philosophizing.

When it comes to food, I have built a philosophy around the idea that foods are neither good, nor bad, but nutritionalism and “fast” food are.

When is food healthy? When it has high nutritional numbers? Low in fat? Sugar? Salt? Low calories? Or some discovered health benefit? Is it healthy when it has a label of “natural,” “organic,” or even “healthy?”

For countless generations people ate food to survive, and enjoyed it whenever they could. Enjoyment usually meant the addition of fat, salt, or sugar, and often all three. People didn’t use to live very long, yet were very active physically and mentally. Food was an active part of their health, but only because they were eating it.

It is a misconception that contemporary people have a leg up on our great grandparent, pesant ancestors because of our “health knowledge.” The reality is that our ancestors did actually know every sign of health very well. Their lives depended on it. Strong bodies and sharp reasoning were needed every day to keep food on the table. Whether it was on the farm, at the shop, or in a factory, people knew their bodies well, how much they could do, and how much food they needed to do it. They saw health, with all its nuanced glory in their animals, themselves, and in each other.

True, they didn’t have the scientific knowledge to back it up, and superstitions were often wrong, but then again there wasn’t a need for more “knowledge,” because people were healthy as a matter of course; or at least didn’t live long enough to know the difference. Actual contagious diseases were the enemy then, not our self inflicted stress illnesses. Our ancestors had medical problems, not health problems. Those things are too very different, yet related things that often become conflated in our over-informed society.

When scientists began to understand the nature of nutrients in the mid-twentieth century, they were able to find ways to rid society of mal-nutrition, but it didn’t actually make the rest of us normally-nourished people any “healthier.” Mal-nutrition was a medical problem then, and not the health indicator it is now. In Western society, there is really no such thing as mal-nutrition anymore, even amongst the poorest of us. When compared to the dire conditions that true famine and starvation caused in the past, and still do in areas of the world like Sub-Saharan Africa, minor boughts of “not-in-perfect-health” are a mere shadow.

Taking all that into consideration, why are we so concerned with “nutrients” in our food? Unless a doctor has tested you and found that there is a medical problem, few are actually in danger of nutrient problems. I hear people talk about protein and vitamins all the time, I do it to, instead of food. We should be talking about the body’s reaction to that food, as in taste, vitalization, and satisfaction. Nutrients, and the corresponding nutritionalism, are small parts of the wrong puzzle for most of us.

Our bodies don’t react, or function on nutrients. In fact, they require, and function on food. So what is food, then? For one, it is not simply the carier of nutrients. Food is a conglomeration of emotions, sustenance, and a giant mix of compounds. On any given day or given meal, no one can be totally sure what food does nutritionally in the body. It is a short term stimulus, and a long term metabolic stabilizer. Food is the sum of everything beyond the air we breath that keeps us alive.

Food is so wondrous and complex, we need to relax about it, and with it, then build a nuanced approach to eating. A big part of my choices now revolve around being a vegetarian (with some fish once in a while), but there are a whole bunch of other considerations to eating healthy, too.