That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat ”food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they’re absorbed. But food scientists can add back only the nutrients food scientists recognize as important.