Over the past year, initiatives like MAHA and renewed discussions around the Dietary Guidelines for Americans have signaled something important: a growing recognition that our dominant approach to food and health is not working. Rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic dysfunction continue to rise despite decades of increasingly detailed nutritional advice. In response, policymakers and experts have proposed familiar solutions: clearer labels, reformulated products, stricter thresholds, and better consumer education.
The intentions are good. But the problem runs deeper.
Nutrition reform efforts tend to assume that if we improve the content of food, or at least improve how that content is displayed, health outcomes will follow. But history suggests otherwise. We have changed labels many times before. We have revised macronutrient targets, demonized and rehabilitated fats, refined carbohydrate guidance, added fiber recommendations, and most recently layered microbiome language onto an otherwise unchanged framework. We even ‘flipped’ the Food Pyramid.
And yet, real-world eating continues to defy prediction.
Identical foods produce different outcomes in different people. The same meal can raise glucose sharply one day and barely register the next. Late-night snacks behave differently from identical foods eaten earlier. Stress, sleep deprivation, illness, medications, and social context all reshape metabolic responses. These are not rare exceptions. They are the norm.
This is not because people are “noncompliant.”
It is not because the science is weak.
It is because the framework is incomplete.
The Limits of Nutritionism
Modern nutrition is dominated by a worldview often referred to as Nutritionism: the idea that food can be understood primarily as a collection of nutrients: micronutrients, vitamins, and macronutrients along with their calories, whose effects can be isolated, measured, and optimized. This logic emerged from early-20th-century successes in preventing deficiency diseases like scurvy, rickets, and pellagra. For that historical moment, it was revolutionary and lifesaving.
But Nutritionism now presides over an era defined not by deficiency, but by disability and chronic disease.
The failure is not subtle. When two foods with identical nutrition labels behave differently in the body, the response is usually to look for a missing variable: more protein, less saturated fat, more fiber, fewer “bad” ingredients. When outcomes still diverge, the explanation shifts to individual responsibility or willpower.
Rarely do we question the underlying assumption that food’s meaning resides entirely in its components.
Food Does Not Enter the Body—It Happens to It
Living systems do not simply absorb nutrients. They decode and interpret signals.
Every meal delivers information to a complex adaptive system: through digestion, hormones, immune pathways, neural circuits, and the gut microbiome, all operating within a specific temporal, emotional, and social context. A calorie tells us how much heat could be released in a bomb calorimeter. It tells us almost nothing about how a living organism will process that food message while attempting to regulate energy, predict risk, and maintain stability in an uncertain environment.
This is why labels struggle. They list content, but living systems respond to meaning. It is like trying to understand Hamlet by reading the Table of Contents.
Meaning emerges from interpretation.
Why Labels Keep Failing
Label reforms rest on a simple and appealing assumption: that better disclosure leads to better decisions, and better decisions lead to better health. If consumers are given clearer numbers: fewer calories, less sugar, and more fiber, they will make more rational choices, and health will follow.
But this logic mistakes eating for calculation.
Nutrition labels are static representations of dynamic signals. They freeze food into numbers, stripping it of time, context, and relationship. A label cannot encode when a meal is eaten, whether the eater is stressed or well-rested, socially safe or isolated, calm or vigilant. It cannot reflect prior exposure, metabolic history, microbial composition, or whether the food is consumed slowly at a table or hurriedly, alone, late at night. Yet these factors are not peripheral. They shape how the body interprets every subsequent signal.
This failure is not unique to nutrition science. Economists encountered the same problem when classical models assumed that people behave as perfectly rational actors, optimizing outcomes based on complete information. W. Brian Arthur and others showed why those models broke down: real economies are complex adaptive systems, composed of humans who learn, err, imitate, and respond to context. Prediction fails not because people are irrational, but because systems are complex.
Nutrition labels make the same mistake. They imagine eaters as rational processors of numerical inputs, when real eating occurs inside living systems shaped by feedback, memory, stress, culture, and time. Like price signals in real markets, food signals are interpreted—not simply received.
Even well-intentioned label-driven reforms often deepen the problem. Reducing added sugar, increasing fiber, or fortifying nutrients often results in reformulated ultraprocessed foods that preserve sensory intensity while further degrading structural and biological coherence. Sweetness remains loud. Texture is engineered. Signals arrive stripped of their natural grammar.
From the body’s perspective, these foods are not “healthier.” They are noisier.
They increase prediction error. Hormonal responses overshoot. Satiety cues weaken. Metabolic pathways shift toward vigilance and storage. The system adapts not because it is broken, but because it is responding to unreliable information.
This is the layer labels cannot reach.
Which brings us to what’s missing.
Introducing the Dietary-Infosome
To understand why nutrition reforms repeatedly disappoint, we need a broader unit of analysis.
Within our Culinary Medicine framework, I define the dietary-infosome[1] as:
The total informational content of food as it is interpreted by a living system over time.
It includes signals from nutrients, bioactive compounds, microbial metabolism, and food structure—along with timing, context, and environment. Health depends less on isolated components than on the coherence of these signals across meals and eating patterns.
In other words, food is not just what it contains, but how it communicates.
The dietary-infosome includes:
- Molecular signals (amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals)
- Bioactive compounds (polyphenols, flavonoids, terpenes, etc.)
- Microbiome-mediated signals (short-chain fatty acids, microbial metabolites)
- Structural and contextual information (food matrix, processing level, timing, social setting)
Labels capture only a fragment of this message.
Why Ultraprocessed Foods Confuse the System
Ultraprocessed foods are not merely “bad” foods. They are informationally distorted foods. They deliver intense sensory cues such as sweetness, saltiness, and fat without the structural, microbial, and temporal context the body has evolved to expect.
From the perspective of a living system attempting to reduce uncertainty, ultraprocessed foods repeatedly generate prediction error. Over time, these responses are not transient. They become written into physiology, microbiome composition, and even gene regulation.
The system is not broken.
It is responding appropriately to unreliable information.
Why This Matters for Policy
Efforts like MAHA are in the right direction in recognizing that ultraprocessed foods are a problem (even if they refuse to define them—see previous column and MAHA Scorecard). But without addressing how food is interpreted, reforms risk repeating the same cycle: new guidelines, new labels, new reformulations, followed by the same outcomes.
Health does not emerge from optimizing numbers. It emerges from coherence between the signal and the system.
Traditional food cultures did not need nutrition labels to support health because they preserved signal integrity: real ingredients, intact structure, predictable timing, and shared context. These patterns delivered comprehensible messages a human body and gut microbiome that evolved to hear them.
A Better Question
When we understand food as information, the guiding question changes.
Instead of asking:
How many calories is this? How much protein does it contain?
We ask:
What message does this meal send? And how will my body interpret it?
Until nutrition policy begins to grapple with that question, new labels alone will not patch the holes in our sinking ship.
Selected References:
Fardet, A., & Rock, E. (2014). Toward a new philosophy of preventive nutrition: from a reductionist to a holistic paradigm. Nutrition Reviews, 72(4), 226–241.
Fenster, M. S. (in press). Dinner with God: Understanding the Language of Food.
Kitano, H. (2002). Systems biology: a brief overview. Science, 295(5560), 1662–1664.
Koh, A., De Vadder, F., Kovatcheva-Datchary, P., & Bäckhed, F. (2016). From dietary fiber to host physiology: short-chain fatty acids as key bacterial metabolites. Cell, 165(6), 1332–1345.
Monteiro, C. A., et al. (2019). Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them. Public Health Nutrition, 22(5), 936–941.
Panda, S. (2016). Circadian physiology of metabolism. Science, 354(6315), 1008–1015.
Scrinis, G. (2008). On the ideology of nutritionism. Gastronomica, 8(1), 39–48.
Zhang, Y., et al. (2020). Dietary patterns and DNA methylation: a systematic review. Advances in Nutrition, 11(4), 819–832.
[1] The term dietary-infosome and its formal definition were introduced by Michael S. Fenster, MD, as part of the Culinary Medicine framework developed in Dinner with God: Understanding the Language of Food (in press). The term denotes the integrated informational properties of food as interpreted by living biological systems over time, rather than a metaphorical construct.
