ColumnThe real danger of functional foods.

You’re standing in the cereal, snack, drink, or dairy aisle and the packages are screaming their claims at you: “high fiber,” “low fat,” “contains probiotics,” “now with added soy protein.”

Welcome to the world of functional foods—foods that claim to have health promoting or disease-preventing properties beyond the basic function of supplying nutrients.

Healthy food doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The idea that we can take a nutrient that has been proven in one study to lower cholesterol, increase energy, or repair cells, and then simply add it to a processed food to give that food a healthier profile is faulty. It’s an illustration of our societal belief that every problem can be solved and there is a formula to doing so. If you don’t believe we in this society share such a belief, take a walk through the self-help section in any bookstore and look at the book titles.

It would be simple to advise not buying packaged food, and indeed, I have said that in this column before. But ultimately, I think we need to look at food and nutrition ecologically. Each nutrient is part of a functional system and each food that we ingest is a part of the body’s functional system. Beyond that, the food we eat is also part of our larger socio-economic and cultural system around food.

When I shop for food I think a lot about the different levels of nourishment in it. Does it nourish my heart, my soul? Does it nourish my pleasure centers by tasting good? Does it nourish the relationships I have with the people I’m eating with? Does it nourish the environment, or cause harm? Does it nourish the people who produce it, or exploit them?

To take an ecological view of food is to understand that the physical, cultural, social, environmental, and economic results of ingesting a food or nutrient cannot be predicted or understood in isolation. Foods interact with one another, in the body, around the table, and in society—all of which contribute to their overall ability to nourish. None of this can described by a marketing claim.

Next time you’re shopping, instead of thinking about whether the food in your cart is going to provide you with the proper balance of Omega-3s and 6s, sufficient antioxidants to prevent cancer, or enough fiber to lower your cholesterol, think about how it will taste, who you will eat it with, how you will prepare it, where it came from, who produced it and if it’s in season. In short, think about whether that food is the right thing for you to eat right now.

The marketing of functional foods is not just annoying because it takes advantage of consumer confusion and fear around nutrition, it’s also dangerous because it assumes we don’t have our own holistic understanding of food and, in the end, dis-empowers us to make our own decisions about what to eat.

When you see the following statements or ingredients on a package of food, chances are what you’re buying isn’t nutrition but marketing:

Antioxidants
Probiotics
Vitamins
Fiber
Soy protein
DHA
Green Tea (unless the product is tea)
Healthy
Reduces cholesterol
Clinically proven
Heart healthy
Digestive health

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: The Impulsive Buy via Flickr

The post The Ecology of Food appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnFood Science Hall of Shame.

Everyday whole foods can be both powerful medicine and handy around the house. But when industry gets its grip on ordinary foods and repurposes them into other substances, the results can be either clever or diabolical, depending on the purpose (and the marketing) behind them.

Clever is a new process that extracts oil from food waste (that would otherwise decompose and emit methane) to make biofuel. Clever is using trash-eating microbes to turn landfill into compost. Clever is burning rice hull waste to create liquid smoke, which is usually made from burnt wood. Not only does this practice save trees and lessen waste, but the smoke from rice hulls might actually be good for your health. Evidently smoke from rice hulls contains an antioxidant that could help fight off diseases and prevent inflammation.

Then there’s the not so positive side of food science. As we’ve seen throughout history, good science in any field sometimes has bad consequences.

Diabolical is taking a perfectly healthy substance like dietary fiber from oats or barley (beta-glucan) and using it to reduce the salt content in highly processed chemical laden “chicken” that will be marketed as healthy to an unsuspecting public. Diabolical is using corn to make maltodextrin, a highly processed encapsulated starch that is added to snack foods including breads, cookies, muffins, and crackers, so they can be marketed as high fiber “good-for-you” foods.

I’m tempted to say that the dissembly and molecular reconstruction of ordinary food substances into new substances that turn other ordinary foods into supposedly “healthier” versions of themselves is truly science gone bad, but I don’t think science is the problem. I can see why scientists would want to discover and study these processes. Knowledge is seductive and the potential for discovery of something truly useful is always there.

The problem is in the funding of such endeavors. Entire books have been written about how the food industry drives scientific discoveries in nutrition. Because industry is focused on the bottom line and not the public good, when industry funds science, it has to find a way to recoup its costs. Nutritionism is often the result. And the marketing schemes used to sell so called functional foods lead the public into an alternate food universe in which Omega-3 fortified, high fiber, low fat, Froot Loops can be seen as healthier than plain old oatmeal.

So what to do? Buy as few packaged foods as possible, and when you do, look at the packaging. The louder it screams and the more bright colors it sports, chances are it’s been fortified or “improved” in a way that would make it unrecognizable as food to anyone living 75 years ago.

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This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: IRRI Images

The post Alternative Uses for Food…for Better or Worse appeared first on EcoSalon.