Healthy Living
Questionable Nutrition Claims
When dietary science meets food marketing, the results can be scary
By Paul Scott, Photographs by Stephen Lewis,
August 30, 2011/Eat This, Not That
Look around your supermarket. A can of peaches boasts "50 percent less calories," while fresh peaches sit unadorned in a bin. New "spreads" shout that they'll lower your cholesterol, while perfectly healthy butter sits quietly on cool shelves. Pop-Tarts offer "20% DV fiber," while beans—the kings of dietary fiber—are called, simply, beans.
Why are we being bombarded with such sketchy claims? It's mostly marketing, but part of the blame also lies with science. Scientists isolate and identify nutrients, which sounds like a logical way to analyze food. But it isn't. "We eat foods; we don't eat nutrients," says Lisa Young, Ph.D., R.D., a dietitian at New York University.
This focus on individual nutrients can lead to misleading conclusions. Gyorgy Scrinis, Ph.D., a sociologist of science at the University of Melbourne, Australia, calls the mindset "nutritionism." "It's the tendency to celebrate or demonize particular nutrients," he says, "and to take nutrients out of the context of the foods in which they're embedded, and exaggerate their health effects." As a result, nutritionism can inadvertently steer consumers toward processed foods instead of away from them.
There was a time before nutritional science, of course. For centuries, humans followed cultural traditions, not dietary guidelines. The age of nutritionism took flight in the 1970s, when health officials, in an attempt to combat chronic diseases, launched campaigns that vilified natural components of food, such as fat.
The result has often been the opposite of what the food police intended. "In response to the low-fat campaign, the food industry has produced numerous commercial products labeled as 'low-fat' or 'fat-free,' but with high amounts of refined carbohydrates and sugar," writes Frank Hu, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues at Harvard school of public health in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. But as fat consumption has declined in the United States, they argue, rates of type 2 diabetes and obesity have risen dramatically. And while the benefits of a low-fat diet have been largely debunked, the assumptions of nutritionism continue to lead to the creation of unhealthy foods.
The solution: Ignore the nutrient hype and focus on actual ingredients and whole foods. As an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association put it, with the exception of omega-3 fats, trans fat, and salt, "the greater the focus on nutrients, the less healthful [processed] foods have become."
Claim #1: Sugar is healthier than HFCS
Even the official USDA dietary guidelines are heavily influenced by
food companies, says Marion Nestle, Ph.D., M.P.H., a nutritionist at New
York University. In the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Nestle
and Stephen Woolf, M.D., M.P.H., of Virginia Commonwealth University,
write that "the food industry, ranchers, restaurateurs, and beverage
producers—along with their lobbyists—have famously exerted pressure to
eliminate or soften language in the guidelines that might harm
commercial interests." That's why the guidelines never recommend eating
less of a particular food, like steak, Nestle says. Instead, they vilify
individual nutrients, such as saturated fat (which doesn't deserve its
bad name; see Claim #4).Those demonized ingredients end up distracting us from a focus on whole foods. "There is a 'bad ingredient du jour' approach to nutrition policy," says Michele Simon, J.D., M.P.H., a public-health lawyer and the author of the book Appetite for Profit. "First it was saturated fat, then trans fat, and now it's high-fructose corn syrup.
"But when we focus on one ingredient, we end up with products like trans-fat-free Cheetos, or Pepsi Natural, which has sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. There's nothing natural about processed sugar. We need to take a holistic approach and realize it's the entirety of processed foods that is the problem and not just one ingredient."
Claim #2: We can improve on nature
A common trick of manufacturers is to inject so-called good nutrients
into all manner of foods. But any gain is more marketing than science.
Take fiber, for example. Beans and plants provide many benefits for the
body. Fermenting and holding water as they pass through your colon is
one of them.Because nutritionism singles out the fiber in plants for this benefit, food giants like Cargill extract a kind of fiber from chicory root. They sell this fiber, known as inulin, to companies like Kellogg's and General Mills, which then incorporate it into processed foods like cereal bars and Pop-Tarts. "It's unlikely this ingredient has the same benefits of real fiber in the body," Young says, "yet companies imply that it has the same impact as naturally occurring fiber."
In fact, studies suggest that inulin doesn't lower cholesterol the way the fiber in whole grains does. Worse, it's packaged into refined carbohydrates, which we know raise triglycerides and lower good cholesterol. This Dr. Frankenstein approach to nutrients extends to omega-3 fatty acids. You'd think that foods fortified with omega-3s, including some cereals, pasta, and frozen waffles, would reduce your risk of heart disease. But foods are usually fortified with a type of omega-3 called ALA, whose benefits pale in comparison with the DHA and EPA varieties that come from fish, says Young.
But adding "omega-3" to a label helps sales. As Michael Pollan explains in his book In Defense of Food, "the typical whole food has much more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism" because you "can't put oat bran in a banana or omega-3s in a peach."
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