Download eat, drink and be healthy

EAT, DRINK AND BE HEALTHY
Adding nutrients to foods will help us live better and longer, writes DANYLO HAWALESHKA
RANDY FILBY makes sandwiches to die for. Fresh ingredients -- a pox on anything frozen --
and an emphasis on homestyle preparations have earned his tiny eatery, the Garage, a
reputation as one of Toronto's top vegetarian restaurants. This my-body-is-a-temple sandwich
emporium makes one concession to the bottom line -- selling those popular cans of caffeinated
sugar water with a high profit margin, a.k.a. Coke and other pops with less than stellar
nutritional numbers. But Filby offers his customers an alternative: fruit juices spiked with
holistic blends of, for instance, echinacea, ginko biloba and ginseng. These beverages by
Smart (fx) of Burlington, Ont., now account for a fifth of his drink sales. "Customers are
concerned about what they're putting into their systems," says Filby. "I want to offer a healthy
alternative."
Smart (fx) is just one player in a huge new business trend -- foods and drinks with special
qualities designed to appeal to health-conscious consumers. A grassroots startup in Toronto in
1996, it's now a major North American distributor of trendy drinks. All across the food industry,
from fledgling firms to giant conglomerates, companies are finding new ways to cook up
increasingly exotic -- and supposedly healthful -- things to feed us. They're hoping consumer
unease about genetically modified Frankenfood, mad cow disease, irradiation and bovine
growth hormones will drive a new market in health-oriented foods. But are these new additiveladen "superfoods" the nutritional nirvana their proponents claim them to be, or are they simply
another marketing ploy?
Within the industry, they're known as "functional foods," edibles enhanced with various
substances that supposedly boost the original food's basic nutritional value and -- it is hoped - reduce the consumer's risk of chronic disease. Then there are the "nutraceuticals," healthful
nutrients isolated from, say, plant or marine sources and sold as pills and capsules, or as
ingredients to make a food "functional." The global market for functional foods, nutraceuticals
and natural health products is currently worth an estimated US$70 billion a year, according to
the Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals at the University of Manitoba.
And it's just taking off. The centre expects that number to explode to as much US$300 billion in
just five years.
According to Bruce Holub, a professor in the department of human biology and nutritional
sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario, a brave new world of science-enhanced eating
is just around the corner. A diet augmented by a growing body of laboratory know-how, he
says, could save lives and billions of dollars in health care costs by preventing disease. And
the change to our food would be imperceptible to finicky palates. "I could have a sausage that
lowered cholesterol because of the plant sterols and the fibre, lowered the triglycerides
because of the omega-3 fatty acids, and tasted like, looked like and acted like a sausage,"
says Holub. "It's all very easy to do."
Already on store shelves from Quebec to the West is William Neilson Ltd.'s Dairy Oh! brand of
milk containing DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid from fish, which is said to be good for the brain,
nervous system and eyes. It costs about 15 per cent more than the regular stuff, but Philippe
Meyersohn, vice-president of marketing, says sales have exceeded expectations and Neilson
is expanding distribution. The milk comes from cows fed a diet rich in herring meal. Referring
to Dairy Oh! as "a natural product," Meyersohn says he sees nothing odd in feeding ground-up
fish to herbivores. "If it was adding weird things, we wouldn't do it," he says. "People don't want
you to mess with their milk -- that's a very clear message from the consumer."
You can also buy anything from pancake mixes to salad dressings and even lip balm
containing hemp oil with health-promoting omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Cevena
Bioproducts Inc., a small Edmonton start-up, augments nutrition bars with cholesterol-lowering
beta-glucan fibre extracted from barley. And on the vision front, preliminary research at the
University of Guelph points to a way of altering eggs to help prevent cataracts and macular
degeneration in people. It involves feeding a substance called lutein, derived from marigold
plants, to hens to increase the lutein content in egg yolks.
But all this new science raises an enormous potential for, on the one hand, misleading claims
by manufacturers and, on the other, rampant skepticism among consumers. That is keeping
the pressure solidly on the federal government to maintain its current hard line on product
labelling. Federal regulations allow manufacturers to make one of only five generic health
claims on their product labels -- for instance, that fruits and vegetables can reduce certain
forms of cancer, or that diets low in saturated fat can reduce the risk of heart disease.
Declaring specifically that nutraceutical X, when added to edible food product Y, helps to lower
the risk of disease Z, however, is verboten.
Those rules make it exceedingly difficult to introduce legitimately healthy new foods, argues
Valerie Bell, president of the Canadian Health Food Association, which represents over 1,300
suppliers and retailers. Compared to Europe, Asia, and in particular Japan, the world leader,
Canada is a laggard in developing its functional-food market, says Bell. "Many of these
ingredients have a forest of medical evidence behind them, but the Canadian government has
been extremely slow to allow health claims," she adds. "Even the U.S. government is way
ahead of us, and they're not exactly leading the charge either."
One way to go, says Guelph's Holub, would be to transform the grocery store into a sort of
"nutri-pharmacy." The technology already exists, he says, to let consumers stroll into a
supermarket and have their blood tested: a prick of the finger, a four-minute wait and that's it -they'd be staring at an analysis of their cholesterol, glucose and triglyceride levels. A lifesciences graduate could then direct the shopper to the appropriate aisles stocked with
designer foods that would reduce the risk of, say, developing diabetes, or perhaps keeling
over from a heart attack. "Most people will be cured of their borderline high levels in four
weeks," says Holub. "That's low-cost, effective health care using agri-foods as a sort of
pharmacy for disease prevention."
But will consumers balk if food starts to look less like nutrition and more like a prescription?
Why not just cut back on the North American diet and the high-caloric hoovering of too many
fries, refined grains and desserts? We all know we need more of the fruits, vegetables, whole
grains, legumes, poultry and fish typical of the Mediterranean diet. The marketplace is
addressing some health issues by, for example, slowly lowering or even eliminating the
widespread use of artery-clogging trans fats in crackers, peanut butter, baked goods, breakfast
cereals, and elsewhere. Denmark became the first country to eliminate trans fats, a lead that
the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada has urged Ottawa to follow. A Health Canada task
force is due to release an interim report soon on ways to reduce trans fats in our food.
But maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle takes time and effort. Given our chicken-fingerlicking, remote-control ways, and our stubborn reluctance to follow Canada's Food Guide to
Healthy Eating, magic-bullet solutions to our health problems are awfully tempting. Hence the
hype around functional foods, says Bill Jeffery, national coordinator of the Centre for Science
in the Public Interest in Ottawa, a consumer advocacy organization. But it's buyer beware, he
adds. "It's really just an effort to sell more food," says Jeffery, "by hanging marketers' hats on
a hot-button issue for consumers -- their health."
There's a compelling case to be made that the same force -- marketing -- is to blame for the
current obesity epidemic. Food ads on TV and in magazines are almost all for junk: fast food,
soft drinks, potato chips, salted nuts, candy. Perhaps, argues Jeffery, the federal government
should restrict advertising that targets children. As for functional foods offering the solution, it's
not as if foods with tremendous health advantages are anything new. "Those are already out
there," Jeffery says, "and they've been around for thousands of years."
Last year, Decima Research Inc. handed Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada the results of a
poll suggesting that Canadians may be receptive to a high-tech diet. In a survey of 2,000
adults, 81 per cent expressed at least some interest in learning more about foods "that have
health benefits that go beyond basic nutrition and may reduce the risk of disease and other
health concerns." The poll also showed 71 per cent of respondents said food enriched with
vitamins or minerals are important to eat, while 65 per cent said they already take vitamin
and/or nutritional supplements.
But while the demand for healthier food is real, government regulators face a daunting task in
trying to separate marketing fact from fiction. Enter the Advanced Foods and Materials
Network, one of the federal government's centres of excellence. Rickey Yada, the network's
Guelph-based scientific director, says his job is to dispel myths by identifying what's junk
science and what's not. That includes the use of nutragenomics, the science of determining
how genes affect an individual's physiological response to a nutraceutical. "Echinacea is the
panacea for curing colds," says Yada, "but in reality it may only be good in me, but not you,
because your genetic makeup doesn't accommodate it."
Companies, meanwhile, continue to finesse their message. In Canada, Smart (fx) isn't allowed
to claim its drinks improve mental acuity, although that's implied. "What you drink (fx) how you
think," boasts every bottle's label. Consumer watchdog Jeffery says that Health Canada is
getting close to adjusting its regulations to allow some form of so-called "discretionary
fortification" -- adding vitamins and minerals to food to give the product a commercial edge
over competitors, even if the general public doesn't suffer from a deficiency of those nutrients.
The concern, then, is that nutrients of dubious value could be used to try to sell us food that
might otherwise be bad for us -- a vitamin-enhanced candy bar, for instance.
When Health Canada last updated labelling regulations, in 2003, it heeded the objections of
nutritionists and consumer groups and stopped short of allowing product-specific health claims.
Critics such as Jeffery cautioned that "the research that underpins that type of claim would be
based on very small sample sizes, conducted over a short period of time, often based on
research by commercially motivated scientists." The decision, naturally, disappointed some
companies in the food business. At Cevena Bioproducts, CEO Kimmo Lucas says there's
nothing wrong with a food company doing its own research. "The secrets of a well-designed
study are no secret -- double-blind, randomized, placebo-control, etc., etc.," he says. "The sad
fact is if the companies don't sponsor them, they don't get done."
The new superfood makers say they have their consumers' health in mind, but they're facing a
determined, skeptical opposition as they try to improve their foothold in Canada. "We shouldn't
be thinking in terms of consuming more of a particular brand of mayonnaise, or a particular
brand of breakfast cereal, because a certain constituent has been added to it and that'll reduce
your risk to a certain disease," cautions Jeffery. "That's medicalizing food, and that's not
appropriate." Whether consumers agree with him will depend in part on the strength of the
food makers' science -- and on how much tinkering with their food people can stomach.
GOOEY GOODNESS
Mmmm . . . blindingly white, gooey Wonder Bread, the perfect foundation on which to build the
classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Ask just about any kid. And the post-Thanksgiving
Day hot turkey swimming in thick brown gravy? Without the spongy bread, it seems almost
pointless. But nutritional? Not so much.
The refining required to make the flour in Wonder Bread and similar loaves depletes the final
product of nutrients. You're better off, nutritionally speaking, eating a slice of whole wheat
bread, but for many people it's just not the same. Now Omaha, Neb.-based food giant
ConAgra Foods Inc. has developed Ultragrain White Whole Wheat, a flour that provides baked
goods with more of the nutritional heft of whole wheat while offering the chewy sweetness and
smooth texture of white flour.
Instead of adding ingredients, as with most of the new "functional foods," ConAgra came up
with the new product by changing its milling process. The result: Ultragrain naturally has "four
to five times the levels of potassium, magnesium, manganese, zinc, copper, B vitamins (niacin
and thiamine) and fibre found in refined flour," the company claims. Somebody pass the
peanut butter.
WISE GRANDMA
Eat your oatmeal, grandma would say, it's good for you. And so it was -- we just didn't know
why. While modern science has made a mockery of a lot of folk wisdom, granny seems to
have been bang on in this case. Grains such as barley and oats contain beta glucan, a fibrelike complex sugar that has been shown in clinical trials to be effective in reducing high
cholesterol and the related risk of heart disease.
On the strength of that science, Edmonton-based Cevena Bioproducts Inc., a firm in the
growing "functional food" business, has developed a system to extract beta glucan from oat
and barley flour. It markets the extract, called Visco Fiber, to the makers of supplements,
nutrition bars, fruit juices and smoothies. Get the health benefits of oatmeal, the theory goes,
without having to eat it.
HOLD THE FISH
Fish smells. It has a lot of bones. And it tastes, well, fishy. There are plenty of reasons why
Canadians don't eat enough of it. So Ocean Nutrition Canada in Dartmouth, N.S., lets you skip
the fish but still get the benefits of its omega-3 fatty acids, notably eicosapentaenoic acid
(EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), that are good for the heart, brain and general health.
The company purifies anchovy and sardine oil to produce Meg-3, a popular nutraceutical
containing EPA and DHA. In capsules or as a powder, free of the distinctive taste or smell of
fish, it has six times the concentration of omega-3 acids found in cod liver oil. Meg-3 is used by
makers of bread, muffins, milk, yogurt and other foods in the U.S., Europe and Australia.
By Danylo Hawaleshka
Source: Maclean's, 7/18/2005, Vol. 118 Issue 29, p35, 5p