The Lancet Commissions are widely known as aspirational pieces, providing the mechanisms for consortia and networks of researchers to organize, collate, interrogate and publish around a range of subjects. Although the Commissions are predominantly led by biomedical scientists and cognate public health professionals, many address social science questions and involve social science expertise. Medical anthropologist David Napier was lead author of the Lancet Commission on Culture and Health (2014), for example, and all commissions on global health (https://www.thelancet.com/global-health/commissions) address questions of social structure, everyday life, the social determinants of health, and global inequalities.

Humanity’s main societal and epistemic transitions also mirror changes in its approach to the food system. This particularly holds true for human–animal interactions and the consumption of animal source foods (red meat especially, and to a lesser degree dairy, eggs, poultry, and fish). Hunter-gathering has been by far the longest prevailing form of human sustenance, followed by a diffuse transition to crop agriculture and animal husbandry. This transition eventually stabilized as a state-controlled model based on the domestication of plants, animals, and humans. A shift to a post-domestic paradigm was initiated during the 19th century in the urbanizing populations of the Anglosphere, which was characterized by the rise of agri-food corporations, an increased meat supply, and a disconnect of most of its population from the food chain. While this has improved undernutrition, various global threats have been emerging in parallel. The latter include, among others, a public health crisis, climate change, pandemics, and societal class anxieties. This state of affairs is an unstable one, setting the conditions of possibility for a new episteme that may evolve beyond mere adjustments within the business-as-usual model. At least two disruptive scenarios have been described in current food discourses, both by scientists and mass media. Brought to its extreme, the first scenario relates to the radical abolishment of livestock, rewilding, a ‘plants-only’ diet, and vegan ideology. A second option consists of a holistic approach to animal husbandry, involving more harmonic and richer types of human–animal–land interactions. We argue that – instead of reactive pleas for less or none – future thoughtscapes should emphasize ‘more of the better.’

American AnthropologistVolume 122, Issue 3 p. 657-658 VITAL TOPICS FORUM A Critical Perspective on "Diet-Related" Diseases Adele Hite, Corresponding Author Adele Hite ahhite@ncsu.edu Ronin Institute Email: ahhite@ncsu.eduSearch for more papers by this author Adele Hite, Corresponding Author Adele Hite ahhite@ncsu.edu Ronin Institute Email: ahhite@ncsu.eduSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 August 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13446Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume122, Issue3September 2020Pages 657-658 RelatedInformation

The virtues of ‘plant-based’ eating are commonly extolled in public and academic discourse, in particular in post-industrial countries and exceedingly so on a global level. Animal source foods, on the other hand, are regularly stigmatized for their alleged link with disease,environmental deterioration, and animal abuse. Although there is a reasonable case for the improvement of animal agriculture, this discourse leads to a binary and counterproductive view of food systems: plants are largely seen as beneficial, animal source foods as intrinsically harmful. We argue that this animal/plant binary and the promotion of civic responsibility to accept it as such are cultural constructs that emerged in the Anglosphere during the 19th century. The divide has been continuously evolving since and is currently deepening due to a global sense of urgency, underpinned by various societal anxieties and normative responses. A symptomatic example is provided by the recent call for a Planetary Health Diet and a Great Food Transformation by the EAT-Lancet Commission and its wider network.

Recent work in rhetoric of science, technology, health, and medicine argues for a shift away from critique, even as some health communication scholars call for critical engagement with the situated, ideological nature of scientific claims supporting public health messages. We suggest that critique of scientific claims remains important to rhetoricians of health and medicine, but that such critique must go further in examining interactions between science, values, and public health policy. We offer an adapted version of stasis theory as a framework for pursuing this end. Using the U.S. public health nutrition policy Dietary Guidelines for Americans as a case study, we engage this framework to explore how science-based nutrition policy provides a discursive lens that influences how subsequent scientific evidence is produced, interpreted, and employed.

This investigation follows the shift in US "healthy diet" guidance from prevention of nutritional deficiencies to prevention of chronic diseases. In particular, it shows how the Dietary Goals for Americans, first published in 1977, came to be based on the relatively new science of nutritional epidemiology of chronic disease, a methodology of statistical analysis whose most influential datasets relied primarily on white health professionals deeply invested in cultural norms surrounding dietary health. With this scientific authority, health differences among subpopulations came to be blamed on a lack of agency at best, if not poor judgment and personal failure.

Background: For almost 50 y, the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) has measured the caloric consumption, and body heights and weights of Americans. The aim of this study was to determine, based on that data, how macronutrient consumption patterns and the weight and body mass index in the US adult population have evolved since the 1960s.Methods: We conducted the first comprehensive analysis of the NHANES data, documenting how macronutrient consumption patterns and the weight and body mass index in the US adult population have evolved since the 1960s.Results: Americans in general have been following the nutrition advice that the American Heart Association and the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services have been issuing for more than 40 y: Consumption of fats has dropped from 45% to 34% with a corresponding increase in carbohydrate consumption from 39% to 51% of total caloric intake. In addition, from 1971 to 2011, average weight and body mass index have increased dramatically, with the percentage of overweight or obese Americans increasing from 42% in 1971 to 66% in 2011.Conclusions: Since 1971, the shift in macronutrient share from fat to carbohydrate is primarily due to an increase in absolute consumption of carbohydrate as opposed to a change in total fat consumption. General adherence to recommendations to reduce fat consumption has coincided with a substantial increase in obesity. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This conversation is part of a special issue on “Critical Nutrition” in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section one author calls into question the validity and efficacy of the 1977 Dietary Goals for the United States that are still widely used in official nutrition information. A second author considers whether official dietary recommendations are commonly known, let alone followed, and therefore questions their effectiveness at shaping actual dietary practice.

This conversation is part of a special issue on “Critical Nutrition” in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section, authors reflect on the limits of standard nutrition in understanding the relationship between food and human health. They also focus on how nutrition practitioners are or could be creating different practices for how nutritional information is made available, shared, and absorbed. Among the different frameworks under discussion are individualized nutrition, ecological nutrition, critical dietary literacy, feminist nutrition, and technologies of humility.

What does a clinician need to know about low‐carbohydrate (LC) diets? This review examines and compares the safety and the effectiveness of a LC approach as an alternative to a low‐fat (LF), high‐carbohydrate diet, the current standard for weight loss and/or chronic disease prevention. In short‐term and long‐term comparison studies, ad libitum and isocaloric therapeutic diets with varying degrees of carbohydrate restriction perform as well as or better than comparable LF diets with regard to weight loss, lipid levels, glucose and insulin response, blood pressure, and other important cardiovascular risk markers in both normal subjects and those with metabolic and other health‐related disorders. The metabolic, hormonal, and appetite signaling effects of carbohydrate reduction suggest an underlying scientific basis for considering it as an alternative approach to LF, high‐carbohydrate recommendations in addressing overweight/obesity and chronic disease in America. It is time to embrace LC diets as a viable option to aid in reversing diabetes mellitus, risk factors for heart disease, and the epidemic of obesity.