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10/8/13 Adding Nutrients From One Food to Another - NYTimes.com
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Lars Klov e f or The New York Times
MIXING IT UP Food companies havebeen extracting nutrients from one food(like tomatoes, broccoli, green tea,pomegranates) and processing theminto other foods (like breakfast cereal,chocolate, coffee and ginger ale).
Superfood or Monster From the Deep?
Thomas Herpich
By JULIA MOSKINPublished: September 16, 2008
OFF the coast of Peru swim billions of sardines and anchovies: oily,smelly little fish, rich in nutritious omega3 fatty acids. Their spot onthe food chain is low; many will be caught, ground up, and fed asfishmeal to bigger animals.
But a few have a more exalted destiny:to be transported, purified and servedat North American breakfast tables inthe form of Tropicana Healthy Heartorange juice and Wonder Headstartbread. These new products promise todeliver the health benefits of fish oilwithout the smell and the taste — without, in fact, the fish.
The possible benefits of eating omega3s includecardiovascular protection and improved neuraldevelopment in children.
However, “People just aren’t eating salmon or sardinestwice a day,” said Ellie Halevy, director for marketing ofTropicana, which is owned by PepsiCo. “But they will drinktwo glasses of orange juice, if it has no fishy taste and allthe benefits.”
Orange juice laced with anchovies is one example of thelatest way major food companies are competing for healthconscious consumers: plugging one food into another andclaiming the health benefits of both. Shoppers are offeredgreen tea extracts in their ginger ale, yogurt bacteria intheir salsa, and powdered beets in their peanut butter.Market staples like blueberries (high in certain
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10/8/13 Adding Nutrients From One Food to Another - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/dining/17nutrients.html?pagewanted=all 2/5
Lars Klov e f or The New York Times
Lars Klov e f or The New York Times
Lars Klov e f or The New York Times
antioxidants), cherries (may have antiinflammatorybenefits) and bananas (when unripe, particularly rich infiber) are being broken down, shaken up,microencapsulated, and put to work in new ways.
These additives are often called nutraceuticals, broadlydefined as ingredients that are derived from food, and thatoffer health benefits associated with that food.Nutraceuticals like garlic pills and cranberry capsulesbecame popular in the 1990s, usually taken alone in theform of dietary supplements.
Now Kraft, Dannon, General Mills and many othercompanies are adding nutraceuticals to existing foods:“fatburning waffles” made from a newly developed cornflour, cheese that kills intestinal parasites, even ketchupthat regulates digestion, are on the shelves or in the works.New technologies in food processing, and a landmark 1999court decision giving the makers of supplements broadleeway to advertise their health benefits, have brought thisnew class of enhanced foods to supermarket shelves.
These products are known as functional foods, meaningthey have been modified to make them more nutritious, likegenetically modified rice or fortified milk.
“One day, we believe, you will be able to walk into asupermarket and all the products could be enriched withomega3s: milk, yogurt, tortillas,” said Ian Lucas, head ofmarketing for Ocean Nutrition Canada, maker of the fishoil used by Tropicana.
Are we really that close to a world in which food functions as a nutrient delivery system,made possible by microencapsulation and finespray coating? And what would this meanfor food and human nutrition?
“This whole area is far more complex than we thought just one or two years ago,” saidAlice H. Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University.
Since the 1970s, as nutrition research has progressed beyond “vitamins and minerals,” avariety of new compounds have been touted as the key to health: antioxidants (related tovitamins, these include lycopene, betacarotene and other plantbased nutrients); longchain fatty acids like omega3s, plentiful in fish and some plants; and “probiotics,” the livebacteria in yogurt and fermented vegetables.
There is significant scientific agreement — the standard the Food and DrugAdministration requires before foodmakers can place unqualified health claims onpackaging — on the benefits of certain nutrients, including calcium, fiber, folate, soyprotein, omega3 fatty acids, lactic acid bacteria and a few others. In food, these haveproved to help protect against specific diseases (calcium against osteoporosis, omega3fatty acids for heart disease), and many nutritionists believe that they are beneficial insupplement form.
However, recent studies on supplemental vitamin E, betacarotene and folate (all of whichfall into the broad category of “antioxidants”) surprised everyone by showing no benefitswhatsoever for cardiovascular disease. “There is a great deal we don’t know about how thecompounds in food are made available to the body,” Dr. Lichtenstein said. “Now we haveto be more cautious about individual nutrients, though we should not close our minds,given the successes of the past.”
Fortified food is certainly one of the great triumphs of publichealth policy. When vitamin
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10/8/13 Adding Nutrients From One Food to Another - NYTimes.com
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Benriched flour was introduced in the 1940s, rates of pellagra plummeted. Iodinefortified salt virtually wiped out goiter, and vitaminDenriched milk eliminated rickets inchildren. But some experts say that such carefully designed campaigns have little incommon with the fortified products now turning up in supermarkets.
“Those decisions were based on rigorous publichealth studies,” said Dr. JeffreyMechanick, a professor of endocrinology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “But thescience hasn’t been done on the new nutraceutical products, and the F.D.A.’s currentlabeling standards are inadequate.”
The agency does not have specific rules for the labeling of functional foods. “It all dependson what type of claim is being made,” said Michael Herndon, an agency spokesman. “Anunqualified health claim like ‘calcium reduces your risk of osteoporosis,’ has to be provedin advance. A more general claim like ‘X keeps your heart healthy’ has to be provable bythe manufacturer, but we would not require proof in advance.” As with conventionalfoods, functional foods must clearly state the presence of allergens, like milk or fish, in theingredients list.
The Food and Drug Administration does not conduct nutritional research. Several otherfederal agencies do so, but functional foods are not evaluated by any specific office.“Nutraceutical products have characteristics of both food and drugs,” said David A.Kessler, a former commissioner of the F.D.A. “It’s easy for them to slip through the cracks,and the industry is always ahead of the agency.”
The freemarket policy on claims for nutraceuticals benefits companies like LycoRed, aglobal provider of compounds pulled out of tomatoes that grow in desert greenhouses inIsrael. LycoRed, like FutureCeuticals, National Starch, the German chemical giant BASFand other companies, produces a range of additives for the food industry.
“Everybody already knows that a tomato is healthy,” said Udi Alroy, the company’s chiefmarketer. “We don’t have to sell something from Mars.” But the form in which the tomatoappears in LycoRed products is somewhat unearthly. Specially bred tomatoes, bright redand flavorless, are pulped and then treated to extract the valuable compounds oflycopene, betacarotene and lutein — which are then encapsulated in “beadlets” so tinythey cannot be felt by the human tongue.
“People want their food to have the same organoleptic qualities, not be gritty or tastedifferent or feel weird,” said Kevin Stark, head of the food technology division ofNineSigma, a research company that helps put clients like General Mills and Procter &Gamble in touch with scientists and technologists around the world.
The tiny capsules, made of fat, protein or sometimes plastic, can be designed to deliverfoods to a particular part of the digestive tract. Some capsules can wait out long periodson shelves or even survive heat treatment, the method used to cook and sterilize mostcanned foods.
Other new technologies can remove the fishy smell of fish, distill a pomegranate intoflavorless powder and possibly deliver the nutritional benefits of a green bean via a slice ofpound cake, and major players like Dannon, Nestlé and PepsiCo are plunging in.
A new brand of peanut butter, Zap, is imperceptibly fortified with powdered beets, carrotsand bananas. Nutritious Chocolate, a new product from Gary Null, a healthfoodmarketer, includes the usual ingredients of chocolate: cocoa butter, cocoa beans, canesugar, vanilla. Oh, and broccoli, cranberries, nectarines, parsley, pomegranates,watermelons, kale and more — a total of 30 additional plants, all in powdered form.
But whether the nutritional benefits of the original foods survive in additive form is still tobe determined.
“Whether a tomato is good for you, that’s one thing,” Dr. Kessler said. “Whether thelycopene in a tomato is good for you, that’s another. And then whether synthetic lycopene
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10/8/13 Adding Nutrients From One Food to Another - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/dining/17nutrients.html?pagewanted=all 4/5
A version of this article appeared in print on September 17, 2008, on page F1 of the New York edition.
and microencapsulated lycopene are also good for you, that’s yet another thing.”
In a manufacturing plant outside Paris, the Danone Group, parent company of Dannon,nourishes more than 3,000 different strains of lactic acid bacteria for its lines of“probiotic” yogurts. All yogurt is fermented with live cultures, but Danone claims to haveharnessed yogurt’s healing potential to particular ends. “Different strains work fordifferent problems,” said Miguel Freitas, Dannon’s scientific affairs director. “The one forActivia works on slow transit” — the company’s elegant term for constipation — “and theone for DanActive on immunity.”
Tropicana offers an orange juice tailored for bone loss, another for acid reflux, and one forweight loss. Many factors are pushing this trend toward healthspecific foods: the agingpopulation, changes in labeling rules, the general trend toward micromarketing thatmakes consumers accept, and soon expect, 12 slightly different Tropicana orange juices onthe shelf where one used to be enough for everyone.
Additionally, with recent rising costs in raw materials, flavorings and transport, many foodcompanies are refocusing their research and development; instead of adding expensiveingredients like sundried tomatoes or honeyroasted almonds to existing products, thesearch is on for inexpensive “valueadded” products that customers will pay extra for.Mars’s CocoaVia line of chocolate claims to offer health benefits because of high levels ofantioxidants; an ounce of CocoaVia blueberry almond chocolate costs about $1.25, whilean ounce of the same manufacturer’s Dove blueberry almond chocolate costs about 75cents. In order to get the nutritional benefits from CocoaVia, the company recommendseating two bars a day — an investment of more than $700 and 4,000 fat grams in thecourse of a year.
Eating the right nutrients is a complicated question, one that nutritionists say could mosteasily be solved by eating a wide range of basic foods.
Dr. Lichtenstein of Tufts says that the recent setbacks and surprises in nutrition researchhave made her rethink the whole model of adding nutrients to the diet, despite theeffectiveness of vitamin fortification.
“Maybe the true benefit of eating a lot of fish is that you are actually eating less ofsomething else, like steak,” she said. “Maybe a subtraction model is the key. We have along way to go to find out.”
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