 Research in human nutrition over the last 40 years has led to numerous discoveries and to a comprehensive understanding of the exact mechanisms behind how food news rints affect our bodies. However, the epidemics of diet-related chronic diseases, obesity, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, stroke, cancers, dramatically increases worldwide year after year. Why hasn't all this intricate knowledge translated into improvements in public health? Maybe it has to do with our entire philosophy of nutrition called reductionism, where everything is broken down to its constituent parts, where food is reduced to a collection of single compounds with supposed single effects. The reductionist approach has traditionally been and continues today as the dominant approach in nutrition research. For example, did you know that mechanistically there's a chemical in ginger root that down-regulated four-ball-maristate-acetate-induced-phosphorylation of ERK12 and JNKMAP kinases? That's actually pretty cool, but not while millions of people continue to die of diet-related diseases. We already know that three-quarters of chronic disease risk, diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, cancer can be eliminated if everyone who didn't followed four simple practices, not smoking, not being obese, half an hour an exercise a day, eating a healthier diet, to find as more fruits and veggies and whole grains and less meat. Think what that could mean in terms of the human cause. We already know enough to save millions of lives, so shouldn't our efforts be spent implementing these changes before another dollar is spent, figuring out whether or not some grape skin extract can lower cholesterol in zebrafish? Or even whole foods, for that matter. Why spend taxpayer dollars clogging the arteries of striped minnows by feeding them a high cholesterol diet to see if hawthorne leaves and flowers have the potential to help? Even if they did, and even if it worked in people too, wouldn't it be better to just not clog your arteries in the first place? This dramatic drop in risk, this increase in healthy life years through preventive nutrition, need not involve superfoods or herbal extracts or fancy nutritional supplements, just healthier eating. When Hippocrates said something like, let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food, he didn't mean that foods are drugs, but rather that the best way to remain in good health may be to maintain a healthy diet. Whereas the historical attitude of the field of nutrition may be best summed up by the phrase, eat whatever you want after you eat what you should. In other words, eat whatever you want as long as you get your vitamins and minerals, a mindset epitomized by breakfast cereals, providing double-digit vitamins and minerals, but the road to health is not paved with coke plus vitamins and minerals. This reductionistic attitude is good for the food industry, but not actually good for human health. Because if food is just good for a few nutrients, then you can get away selling vitamin 4 to 5 Twinkies. We need to shift from the concept of just getting adequate nutrition to getting optimal nutrition, not just avoiding scurvy, but promoting health and minimizing our risk of developing degenerative diseases. Bringing things down to their molecular components works for drug development, discovering all the vitamins, curing deficiency diseases, but in the field of nutrition, the reductionist approach is beginning to reach its limits. We discovered all the vitamins more than a half century ago. When's the last time you heard of someone coming down with scurvy, or polygra, or quashyork, or the classic deficiency syndromes? Whereas what about the diseases of dietary excess? Heart disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, ever heard of anyone with any of those? Yet we continue to have this deficiency mindset when it comes to nutrition. When someone tries to reduce their consumption of meat, the first question they may get asked is, where are you going to get your protein? Rather than, wait a second, if you start eating like that, where are you going to get your heart disease from? The same deficiency mindset led to the emergence of a multi-billion-dollar supplement industry. What about a daily multivitamin, just as insurance against nutrient deficiency? Better insurance would be to just eat healthy food.