A spoonful of medicine

September 12, 2004

Will 'functional foods' with added nutrients really make us healthier, or would we be better off sticking with nature? Joanna Wane investigates.

There's a multi-billion-dollar revolution going on at your local supermarket - and it's being led by people who didn't listen when their mothers told them not to play with their food.

On today's shopping list, you can find bread enriched with Omega-3 DHA to boost your intake of fish oils, margarine with plant sterols to lower your cholesterol, breakfast cereals fortified with iron or vitamins, and yoghurt with added probiotics to boost your immune system and protect your gut.

Fuelled by a seemingly insatiable consumer appetite for novelty, companies are tapping into a market that's given new meaning to the concept of health food. And you won't find it in the fruit and veggie aisle.

Internationally, the functional food industry - where a product is enhanced to add nutritional value or health benefits - is estimated to be worth up to $US40 billion and it's growing fast.

In the US, delicatessens in New York have started selling the world's first "beauty beverage", SkinCola, which claims to repel free radicals and promote cell repair. Packaged in old-fashioned glass soft drink bottles, it's a mix of purified water, zinc, vitamins and oxygen.

Here, Fonterra has pioneered the development of "nutraceuticals", isolating specific health-giving components in milk and then marketed them as ingredients in everything from yoghurt and infant formula to anti-inflammatory milk powder and a new drink based on milk proteins instead of sugar.

The old ideal of getting everything you need from simple, fresh food is apparently an outdated concept.

"The reality is that if you give people the choice, they will still eat highly processed products which lack a lot of their original goodness ," says Fonterra technical manager Angela Rowan. "I'm not an advocate for pumping yourself full of vitamin pills, but there's a place for supplementing our diets, and the benefits go beyond nutrition. You can make choices about what you eat to improve your health without the intervention of drugs."

This year, the results of a clinical trial held in India by New Zealand Milk showed that feeding young children fortified milk powder helped prevent major childhood diseases, such as diarrhoea, anaemia and pneumonia.

More than a third of New Zealanders have inadequate iodine intakes and Food Standards Australia New Zealand is preparing discussion papers on the mandatory fortification of staple foods such as bread or flour with both iodine and folic acid (a deficiency of folic acid in pregnancy is strongly linked to the birth of babies with neural tube defects).

Concerns have already been raised over the safety of adding iodine to products other than salt, due to the possibility of a dangerous chemical reaction. And whether the enhancement industry is a technological miracle or simply a commercially astute marketing ploy is still open to debate.

In November, Auckland University is holding a Functional Foods Conference, which will look at how sustainable health claims can be made and what scientific evidence is needed to support them.

Sue Kedgley, food safety spokesperson for the Greens, believes some products are almost being marketed as medicine, muscling in on the natural health benefits of eating fresh food.

Highly processed convenience foods and supermarket staples such as breakfast cereals have been all but stripped of their natural nutrients during the manufacturing process, she says. "Then they try to claim a virtue and marketing advantage by synthetically adding some of them back in at the end."

The promotion of some functional foods is completely misleading, according to Jim Mann, professor of human nutrition and medicine at Otago University.

While probiotic yoghurts and cholesterol-lowering margarines may be useful for certain people, others are being pitched as a quick fix based on unproven science.

"Functional foods are making a huge amount of money and that's why they are being produced, not because the companies doing it believe it will make you and me healthier," he says.

"A high-fibre product may be good, but you can get (the benefits) much more cheaply by sprinkling some bran, which costs almost nothing, over your porridge or cereal.

"I'll be very surprised if, in my lifetime, we see a functional food that changes people's lives."

Carole Gibb, executive officer of the New Zealand Dietetic Association, is ambivalent, too. Plant-sterol margarines, for example, are only recommended for people with raised cholesterol, and the effect of long-term consumption is unknown. Boosting your Omega-3 intake may be the right way to go, but not if it means you're chomping through slices of bread slathered with butter or high-sugar spreads.

Gibb suspects that foods which suggest enhanced quality appeal to the "worried well" who have disposable income and are looking for an edge.

"They're nice little trimmings, if you like, but they don't cut at the core issues," she says. "Our public health priorities are things like weight control, the prevention of diabetes and the effect (of diet) on cancer and cardiovascular disease."

Targeting that same market - the health-conscious but time-poor - is another Fonterra initiative, POSIFoods (point-of-sale individualised foods). The four-year project with researchers at Massey University's Riddet Centre is aimed at developing nutritious vending-machine snacks to meet specific health and dietary needs.

Fonterra's director of marketing and innovation, Bob Major, says being able to dial up the food you want heralds the next era in food technology.

"For example, a 60-year-old woman in Malaysia who is concerned about osteoporosis and iron levels could stand in front of a dispensing machine, press a button and out comes an appealing product that's high in a dairy calcium and iron."

The futuristic prospect of preventing disease by matching diet to your specific gene type is now being seriously explored at the Nutrigenomics Centre, collaboration between Auckland University, AgResearch, HortResearch and Crop & Food.

The theory is that the influence of diet depends on our genetic makeup - which is why one person eating high-fat foods ends up with cardiovascular disease and another doesn't.

Professor Lynn Ferguson, who heads the university's nutrition department, says the initial focus will be on gut health, specifically Crohn's disease, where foods are known to play a role in triggering the genes which cause disease.

Ultimately, the goal is to develop foods that interact with specific genes and future research might look at the possibility of preventing or managing conditions such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease.

It's cutting-edge science and Ferguson says New Zealand is right at the forefront of nutrigenomic research.

Professor Jim Mann isn't convinced that's such a good thing. He recently reviewed the nutritional management of diabetes in Europe and couldn't identify a single food that was particularly useful. He believes an excessive amount of money is being spent worldwide on a field that's exciting and fashionable, when diseases such as diabetes are killing people and the renal unit in Auckland can't cope with the number of patients needing dialysis.

"Certainly money should be spent on gene research," he says. "But I wonder if we have the balance right."

Source:www.stuff.co.nz