Unless you believe in culinary Cartesian dualism Also, I have to point out that this doesn't follow, and is naive What we don't know about nutrition is greate

Unless you believe in culinary Cartesian dualism Also, I have to point out that this doesn't follow, and is naive What we don't know about nutrition is greater than what we know -- that is obvious You might hold an overly static model of food consumption and biology. In terms of what's relevant to your health, food is NOT a linear combination of its nutrients -- that is a fallacy promoted by the food industry and journalists who want catchy headlines. For example, time is a variable. There's nothing that says that eating spinach for 3 meals, followed by beef for 3 meals, is the same as eating spinach and beef together in 6 meals. Even if you eat exactly the same thing. And there are hundreds of other variables not captured by models -- e.g. things like gut bacteria means your body is quite stateful, and has many feedback mechanisms! Models are not reality Nutritional science necessarily relies on models (simple statistics), and there's lot of evidence that they're poor ones -- using their conclusions leads to astoundingly bad outcomes! It's weird that people continue to believe things that don't actually work The kind of reasoning that Pollan uses, which includes a lot of science, is more explanatory and accurate than the reasoning you're using