‘Food, not nutrients, is the fundamental unit in nutrition’, and it pointed out an as-yet unexplained phenomenon: that a number of good studies had identified foods, such as whole grains, nuts, olives and oily fish, that seemed to reduce chronic disease risk, but that the benefit of the relevant nutrient – beta-carotene, fish oil, vitamin B, etc – vanished as soon as they were extracted from the food and taken instead as a supplement.
