Thirty years ago sugar was targeted as a threat to human health, but the issue faded away when jelly bean-loving president Ronald Reagan took office.
A U.S. nutritionist who worked with Hershey’s for 30 years says the zeal to list all the bad ingredients in ordinary food is now being replaced by a healthier approach and better nutrition research.
“The sugar issue really got the attention of the food industry and amplified the need to do more research,” said Barry Zoumas of Pennsylvania State University.
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During a recent international food symposium in Calgary, he addressed the question of whether food can make people healthier and if the concept of functional food is just another fad like the sugar witch hunt.
Sugar content in food was targeted during U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s administration in the mid-1970s.
Zoumas said the only problem anyone could find with sugar was perhaps more dental cavities, but food companies found themselves defending their use of sugar.
Americans ate about 100 pounds of sugar per year and when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the Food and Drug Administration declared it safe.
However, millions of dollars were spent studying sugar and looking for ways to remove it from food.
This was also the beginning of nutritional labelling, in which consumers were warned against “empty calories,” saturated fat, cholesterol and sugar content.
This was controversial for many food companies that did not think labelling would sell, but it received a positive consumer response.
The trend to advertise products as free or low in fat, sugar, caffeine, cholesterol and salt did not work well and the only successful products were low sugar soft drinks and low fat dairy products.
Food companies are now moving toward promoting the positive attributes of food and how it can make people more healthy.
That includes the introduction of functional food and nutraceuticals.
A functional food has a positive health effect beyond its normal nutritional properties. Examples include green tea, red wine, soybeans and probiotics in yogurts.
A nutraceutical is a component that can cause a change, such as oat bran’s ability to remove bioacids from the body and take cholesterol with it.
Vitamins C, D and E, calcium and selenium have nutraceutical properties. For example, calcium lowers the risk of osteoporosis, and selenium is essential in small quantities to prevent cancer.
People living in areas where selenium levels are naturally high appear to have lower cancer rates.
A human body needs 36 essential bioactive components including vitamins, minerals and amino acids. Many compounds in food are bioactive, but they are not nutrients.
A nutrient is a bioactive component of a food that is essential to life and cannot be substituted with something else. For example, a person needs
vitamin E and it cannot be substituted with another antioxidant.
Food also contains thousands of natural chemical entities that can be biologically active with negative or positive effects on health depending on the dose.
Caffeine is an example of a bioactive agent in food that is good or bad depending on dosage.
“Most foods do not contain enough of a bioactive component to really have a biological effect,” Zoumas said.
That is why the components are extracted and concentrated into dietary supplements to enhance the benefit. It is difficult to eat enough of a food to get a high enough dose of the bioactive ingredients without crowding out other essential elements in the diet.
“The big problem with food and nutrition historically in the United States is excess,” he said.
There is an overload of calories, vitamins and minerals, but most people are only eating half as much fibre as needed.
No one is talking much about deficiency diseases, he added, although the FDA has approved more functional food and allows manufacturers to extol the benefits on product labels. These must be innocuous, saying the food may help reduce the risk of a certain condition. They cannot promise a cure.
Food approved for its extra health benefits include nuts, oat bran, canola oil, green tea and olive oil.
A success story in this area is the breakfast cereal Cheerios from General Mills.
It started with a promotion campaign 65 years ago telling people the oat cereal had “go power.”
Next, it was advertised as a low sugar product. Now it is sold as a full fledged functional food to help reduce cholesterol and promote heart health because it contains soluble fibre.
The small print says one cup of the cereal contains one gram of soluble fibre. Three grams of soluble fibre are needed to have any benefit.
