The nutrient-crazy Western society isn't obsessed with food; it's gone gaga over nutrients without realizing it.

Put in another way, people in the West love nutrients, the most visible form of which are pills and liquid dietary supplements. Savvy marketers are telling people they don't have to buy an entire orange to gain the health benefits of Vitamin C. Just pop a Vitamin C pill would do the trick.

Even better, pop a multivitamin pill so you can easily imbibe all those other healthy vitamins and minerals, from A to Z, without the hassle of buying fruits, meat and veggies and cooking them over a hot stove.

It's health for the lazy.

As Dr. Michael Greger said in his scathing indictment of the West's commercialization of nutrition, "food is best eaten whole" and not in small nutrient pieces.

"Eat the broccoli and the blueberries, not some broccoberry supplement," asserted Greger.

He said health now seems to have been reduced to a highly commercialized commodity, in which we’re marketed all kinds of expensive, high-tech tests and treatments of dubious value but with substantial risks attached.

“This is worrisome because most of the things that make us healthy and keep us healthy are cheap and largely available without professional help or commercial prodding," he noted.

And people should always bear in mind 80 percent of death and disability is caused by preventable diet-related diseases. Eat too much sugar and you're setting yourself up for diabetes, for example.

Greger affirmed that "food, not nutrients, is the fundamental unit in nutrition."

Whole foods are better for one’s health than any vitamin pill.

This “corruption in nutrition” is being spread by the need for business firms to make money. Greger said one reason why companies don’t sell whole foods is because selling apples, broccoli, spinach and oranges, for example, won’t make them as much money as they would when selling the vitamin contents of these whole foods as separate pills and dietary supplements.

He said this is why nutrition is now “more about marketing profitable products than educating people about the fundamentals of health and wellness.”

“For example, the benefits of whole grains over refined grains is commonly attributed to the fiber, which enables the food industry to whip out fiber-fortified Froot Loops and make you feel all better,” he quipped.

RELATED STORIES