Good Food Tastes Good: an Argument for Trusting Your Senses and Ignoring the Nutritionists

Do nutritionists really know what's best for us? Is a paper label listing fat, sugar and vitamin content a better guide to food quality than the evidence of our senses, which evolved to fit this purpose? Much of the nutrition advice we are given is overly prescriptive, based on preliminary, short-term studies. This advice, if followed blindly, results in people selecting (or settling for) foods that are neither delicious nor particularly nutritious. Selecting foods for their known nutrient composition conveniently assumes that their unknown nutrient composition is unimportant. Scientists have identified only about twelve to thirteen thousand of an estimated one million chemical compounds naturally present in our food. GOOD FOOD TASTES GOOD is about the complexity of food versus the simplicity of the standard nutrition advice. It gives the evidence to say that taste is a highly evolved and fundamentally reliable guide to nutritional quality--much more reliable, in fact, than reading Nutrition Fact labels. Carol Hart, PhD, is a distinguished health and science journalist and author of the best-selling SECRETS OF SEROTONIN (St. Martin's Press, first edition,1996, revised edition forthcoming, 2008).