When Did "Health Food" Become a Bad Word?

In the 1970s, organic food was attacked by nutritionists as a dangerous "food fad"

Throughout history, most people have wanted to be healthy. After all, who would want to always be sick, lethargic, and unable to carry out a normal life? Most cultures knew which foods were necessary to keep people healthy. There’s a reason why feeding people on just bread and water was a punishment—a more varied diet is required for good health.

But something very strange happened in late twentieth-century America. Trusted authorities like the Food and Drug Administration, nutritional scientists at Harvard and other prestigious universities, and the American Medical Association launched a propaganda campaign to convince people that “health foods” were bad. People who thought that eating healthy, unprocessed, organic food might improve their health were gullible “food faddists,” duped into spending extra money by “quacks.” Along with a lucrative mail-order business in supplements and vitamins, these “quacks” were starting to reach a broader market through “health food” stores. Starting in the 1970s, these shady establishments encouraged “food fads” by selling questionable products like brown rice, yogurt, and blackstrap molasses—all weird, unusual foods that couldn’t possibly improve on normal American cuisine.

So far, I’ve located over 150 articles and eleven books that lump organic food and farming into this category of “food fads.” They’ve got titles like Panic in the Pantry: Food Facts, Fads, and Fallacies; Health Quackery & the Consumer; and Vitamins and “Health” Foods: The Great American Hustle. They date from the 1950s to 1980s, with the biggest bubble published between 1970 and 1978. And they all lump natural, organic, and health foods in with numerous examples of real medical quackery and swindles. I haven’t yet found a book from this time period about medical quackery or food fads that didn’t lump organic food into the “fad” category.

“As nutrition professionals, we have long been taught to view organic agriculture and the food it produces as one of the more extreme of the ‘fads’ with which we must regularly contend,” nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow wrote in a 1974 article for Nutrition Today magazine. Gussow was perhaps the only professional nutritionist of the 1970s to question whether her colleagues should be attacking organic, natural, and health foods.

“It seems extraordinary how much hostility this relatively small band of growers and those who buy their produce have generated,” Gussow remarked. “Here is a group of farmers who choose to produce food by a variety of energy-conserving and non-polluting agriculture techniques. They are not breaking any laws; their food is safe and no less nutritious than food produced by farmers using other methods. Surely in this vast, free country we ought to be able to tolerate such independence of mind. Surely those who choose to experiment with ‘organic’ agriculture ought to be allowed to do so without being harassed as faddists.”

But few, if any, of Gussow’s colleagues agreed with her in the 1970s. The idea that organic, natural, and health foods were somehow bad—that Velveeta, Spam, and Wonder Bread were more patriotic and normal than yogurt, whole wheat bread, and organic veggies—persisted into the 1980s and beyond. A surprisingly large percentage of people who shaped their dietary habits during this time still have a negative attitude toward “health foods,” perceiving them as expensive, unpalatable, and weird. In one of the strangest events in modern history, nutritionists were successful in convincing the majority of Americans to shun “health foods” (including organics and whole grains) in favor of safe, normal, modern processed foods.