20th April, 2019

C. Lockley

Evidence-based Nutrition science is communicated to the public through the Australian Dietary Guidelines, The Dieticians Association of Australia, and qualified Nutritionists. Despite this, the Australian population is getting steadily fatter and sicker (https://bit.ly/2Jwzezq). What if it’s not what we’re communicating, but how?

One-quarter of children and adolescents, and nearly two-thirds of adults in Australia are overweight or obese, and the numbers continue to rise (https://bit.ly/2Jwzezq). Those in regional and remote areas show even greater rates of obesity and diet-related illness (https://bit.ly/2Jwzezq). Improving Australian food habits and increasing public compliance with the Australian Dietary Guidelines would reduce both financial pressure on Government health expenditure, and the risk of diet-related premature disease and death.

IS IT A LACK OF UNDERSTANDING?

With 51% of adults not eating the recommended fruit intake, and 66% not eating enough vegetables (https://bit.ly/2nJ59wc), it is easy to jump to the conclusion that the public is not understanding the science. However recent research (https://bit.ly/2HCZKoW) from the Australian National University on regional Australian adult consumers has found that understanding is not the problem –engagement and trust are.

People find current food and nutrition communication convoluted, complex and inconsistent, impersonal, and devoid of emotional engagement and pleasure (https://bit.ly/2HyKrxE). The ‘medicalization’ of food consumption and the avoidance of pleasure or ‘hedonism’ in meals holds very little appeal (https://bit.ly/2HANVjb). Food reduced to a measurable set of ‘nutrient’ and ‘health’ parameters that ignores flavour, pleasure, story, environment and embedded memory/tradition makes people anxious…even angry (https://bit.ly/2HCZKoW) .

Ignoring or down-playing emotional and pleasure narratives in food and health is just bad communication (https://bit.ly/2Yg7ZMz). Even worse, it results in people ‘throwing the baby out with the bath-water’ and ignoring the science completely in favour of a more relatable personal narrative (https://bit.ly/2HCZKoW) . This in turn makes them ‘sitting ducks’ for pseudo-science, fad diets, and the cleverly woven emotional marketing of unhealthy foods (https://bit.ly/2unXj0K) .

So, if not nutrition science, who and what do consumers value and prioritize when they’re deciding what to eat?

NUTRITION AND GASTRONOMY

The same meal –one that conforms to the Australian Dietary Guidelines and the famed Mediterranean Diet model –consumed under different narratives, has vastly different effects on both the amount of food consumed and the consumer’s emotional state (https://bit.ly/2HCZKoW) .

The story makes a difference, and not just emotionally. Foods that our mind tags as ‘healthy’ or ‘hedonic’ change our hormonal biochemistry. If we believe our meal to be ‘indulgent’ we reach satiety faster. If we focus on it being ‘healthy’, our hunger hormone –ghrelin –doesn’t fall (https://bit.ly/2qgpqwo) . Language and story alone change not just what we choose to eat (https://bit.ly/2HQPSaB) but how our bodies react to it.

Consumers may be ignoring or outright rejecting Nutrition communication, but they love Gastronomy! Our frustration with ‘nutrition’ is only matched by our obsession with food. We’re tuning out of science and tuning in to celebrity chefs and competitive cooking shows in our millions (https://bit.ly/2qwLsu7) . Where we’ll appreciate but largely ignore the macro and micronutrient analysis of the Mediterranean diet and its health benefits, we’ll gobble up Nigella Lawson sashaying about a comforting kitchen and flirting with both us, and her ingredients. No real wonder –it’s a better watch. It’s a comforting, enticing, sexy story this ‘Gastronomy’. It’s familiar. It speaks to either our actual experience, or even more importantly, the one we wish to have.

Nutrition and Gastronomy as entirely separate disciplines is utterly insane (https://bit.ly/2ukBUWb)... They’re both FOOD.

TELL A BETTER STORY SCIENCE

Research shows that Nutrition communication isn’t working, and yet we trot out the same methods, the same yawningly awful Dietary Guidelines and charts year after year. We scrupulously train our dietary ‘experts’ and widen the gap between those that are allowed to know about food, and those that are forever the ‘laity’. At the same time we wring our hands and wail that the public somehow doesn’t ‘understand’ (https://bit.ly/2Wau7WQ) , and that we must try harder…

 There’s a popular definition of insanity as ‘doing the same thing and expecting a different result’.

The public is perfectly capable of understanding, they just don’t buy the story. It’s high time we started listening to them. Expert voices fluent in ‘science-ese’ preaching about nutrients from ivory towers and artificially separated disciplines may continue to to-and-fro amongst themselves, but if it’s public engagement we’re after, it’s time to do away with “Oh but Nutrition is science, and Gastronomy is….not”, and start telling a better story. Listen carefully to the boredom, the frustration and the anger (https://bit.ly/2HCZKoW) , and focus on replacing it with our most basic and hard-wired motivator –pleasure. It’s not a dirty word.