Excellent article in the New York Times:
Foods With Benefits, or So They Say
Start in Aisle 2, third shelf from the bottom: here is grape juice for your heart. Over to Aisle 4: there are frozen carrots for your eyes.
In Aisle 5: vitamin-packed water for your immune system. In the dairy case: probiotic yogurt for your insides and milk for your brain.
Push a cart through the D'Agostino store in Midtown Manhattan, or any supermarket anywhere in America, and you just might start believing in miracles - or at least in miracle foods.
In aisle after aisle, wonders beckon. Foods and drinks to help your heart, lower your cholesterol, trim your tummy, coddle your colon. Toss them into your cart and you might feel better. Heck, you might even live longer.
Or not. Because this, shoppers, is the question: Are all these products really healthy, or are some of them just hyped?
The answer to that question matters to millions of Americans who are wagering their money and their waistlines on hot new products in the grocery aisles called "functional foods."
Food giants like Dannon, Kellogg and General Mills don't claim these products actually prevent or cure diseases. Such declarations would run afoul of federal regulations. Nor do they sell them as medical foods, which are intended to be consumed under a doctor's supervision.
Rather, food companies market functional foods with health-promoting or wellness-maintaining properties. Such claims are perfectly legal, provided that they are backed up by some credible science.
All those heart-healthy red hearts on your box of Quaker Oats cereal or that can of Planters peanuts? That happy-colon yellow arrow on the tub of Activia yogurt? It's all part of the marketing of functional food.
Over the past decade, despite all those sales pitches for natural, organic and whole foods, functional food has turned into a big business for Big Food. And more Americans are buying into the functional story. Sales of these foods and beverages totaled $37.3 billion in the United States in 2009, up from $28.2 billion in 2005, according to estimates from the Nutrition Business Journal, a market research firm.
Reminds me of that wonderful miss-quote from H.L. Mencken:
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
What he really said is even better:
"No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
Apropos for our times...
