Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD
Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, an award-winning registered dietitian and author of six books including the best-selling Healthy Homestyle Cooking(Rodale) and more recently, The Ultimate Omega-3 Diet (McGraw-Hill).
“Functional food” is a term you see fairly often these days. It always reminds me of what health food represented when I was growing up… that stuff that tasted like cardboard, smelled like grass, had weird ingredients and was supposed to be extra-good for you. Of course, with foods like chocolate and grape juice now deemed healthful, “functional food” has taken on a whole new meaning — which, unfortunately, gets lost in the marketing hype. I spoke with Peter Sofroniou, editorial director of a health and nutrition industry trade magazine called Functional Ingredients, regarding the functional food trend.
Actually, the term “functional food” spilled over from the trade to the consuming public. “It’s an industry term and most consumers don’t know what ‘functional food’ means,” admitted Sofroniou. He defined functional foods as those that provide a healthful benefit beyond just basic nutrition. Examples include cranberry juice (for urinary tract infections), oats (for cholesterol-lowering) and blueberries (for their beneficial antioxidants). The definition also includes foods that are specially formulated with an added ingredient that offers a particular health benefit — for instance, calcium-fortified orange juice.
Manufacturers have been adding nutrients to foods to boost health value since the 1920s, when they started adding iodine to salt to prevent goiter. What’s new today is the number of ingredients being added, the types of foods they’re being put into and the breadth of health claims they’re touting. According to Sofroniou, the hottest category in functional foods at present is essential fatty acids for their anti-inflammatory benefits. Also popular are probiotics for digestive health and “superfruits,” including acai, pomegranate, blueberries and noni, because of their high antioxidant values.
The danger, says Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, registered dietitian and author of six books including the best-selling Healthy Homestyle Cooking and more recently, The Ultimate Omega-3 Diet, is that placing the emphasis on an added nutrient or ingredient, even when it’s an important one, leads consumers to believe they get more benefit than is actually present in the food. People wrongly assume eating these enriched functional foods means there is a significant amount of that particular nutrient in each serving — and, more broadly, that by eating something so good, they’ve transformed their diet into a healthy one.
Tribole says food manufacturers often rush to market with products enriched with a certain nutrient after a study finds an association with a lowered incidence of a particular disease or condition. “The problem with this strategy is that we don’t eat one nutrient at a time. We eat whole foods,” says Tribole. “Eating a functional food containing an added blueberry extract doesn’t deliver the same benefits as eating blueberries every day. A single study analyzing a vegetable finds thousands of compounds with potential health benefits. Enriching a food with one of those compounds is no substitute.”
Tribole agrees that adding a healthful ingredient to an already-nutritious food, such as fortifying eggs with extra omega-3 fatty acids, for example, can make it even better for you. But she points out that often there is an enormous discrepancy between the dosage used in the research that demonstrated benefits and how much is actually delivered in a single serving of the food, even when it is a fortified one. Putting a drop of a good ingredient into a product means the health benefits can be used for marketing purposes, but often the actual amount of the ingredient in question is meaningless. Vitamin Water is a good example, since many flavors contain only 10% to 40% of the daily value of just a few vitamins, yet the drink is promoted as being vitamin-rich.
Then there’s the issue of adding infinitesimal amounts of healthy ingredients to unhealthy products. The FDA has rules for how such foods can and cannot be positioned — but cunning marketers come up with ways to make their product seem healthy without actually stating such a claim.
Be smart when shopping. Real food, containing real nutrients or properties that have proven health benefits — calcium, probiotics, omega-3s and the like — is what people should eat for optimal health. Adding even more healthy ingredients to already healthy foods can be helpful. “If you absolutely hate fish, then foods enriched with the omega-3s found in fish can be a blessing,” Tribole said. But beware of nutritionally empty foods that manufacturers want you to believe are healthy because they’re slightly enriched with the nutrient d’jour. As Sofroniou put it, “Don’t buy potato chips enriched with echinacea and expect they’ll cure your cold.”