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On Food: Some marketers don’t let common sense stop them from making odd nutrition claims

On Food: Some marketers don’t let common sense stop them from making odd nutrition claims

When a friend of mine was commissioned to write a 2,000-word article on healthful eating for a popular magazine, she said she just wanted to write “Eat a balanced diet” 500 times.

But of course it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Oh wait, no it isn’t.

It’s true that the human body is complex and that to perform at our absolute peak we need a bunch of different nutrients: carbohydrates, protein and fat, to be sure, but also zinc, potassium, sodium, vitamins A through E, trace amounts of gold, manganese—all sorts of things.

Yet we’ve managed to survive just as we are for tens of thousands of years, eating whatever happened to come our way without even knowing what the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Recommended Daily Allowance of any of it was.

OK, for much of that time our average life expectancy was about 30 to 40 years, and in the United States, as of 2004, it was 77.9 years, up from 47.6 years in 1900. That’s largely due to medical advances that mean we don’t die much anymore from bubonic plague or polio or gangrene—or starvation.

As a result, we do have to worry about things like osteoporosis and heart disease and cancer, but still, apart from allergies and other food sensitivities, eating a balanced diet—a nice mix of fruits and vegetables, whole grains and fiber, protein and starch, without overindulging too often—pretty much covers it.

So why don’t we get it? Why do many Americans indulge in high-fat, high-sugar foods as their mainstay and then rush to consume whatever magical, miracle food is being hawked at that moment in history? Why are 66.3 percent of American adults overweight and 32 percent obese—as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?

I think a big part of it is the simple fact that plentiful, safe, tasty food is at our disposal, and we don’t have to work hard to get it. That situation is very different from the one in which we evolved, when we had to track, scavenge or hunt for anything we ate.

But obnoxious, confusing e-mails about nutrition clog my inbox every week, and they don’t help the situation.

Recently I got a gem from some marketers of something they called wild “jungle peanuts” with the claim that they were allergy-free because they weren’t infested with a mold called aflatoxin.

It seemed to me that if an allergen-free nut existed, I would have heard about it, and so would every public school system in America. So I e-mailed my friend Brian Vickery, a doctor specializing in pediatric allergies who is on a team that is trying to develop a peanut allergy vaccine.

He confirmed my suspicions, explaining that the problem with peanuts is in the kernel itself, which has a protein that exists in at least 10 different forms, any one of which can cause an allergic reaction.

I looked further at the release and realized that it was marketed by raw foodists—you know, the ones who don’t believe in eating anything that has been heated to more than 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now, if you don’t want to cook the food you eat, that’s fine with me, but the release said all sorts of bizarre things about eating raw plant foods, like that it “restores the body on a molecular level—building strong cells, radically naturalizing the body, raising alkalinity, and grounding the person in the natural world.”

Um, what?

“Grounding the person in the natural world,” is marketing speak and has no meaning that I can discern. Where is this unnatural world in which those of us eating food cooked at 119 degrees or higher are lost?

Can someone please explain to me what radical naturalization is? As for raising alkalinity: Alkaline materials, like bleach and nightshade, are poisonous. Our bodies’ pH is set to a very specific point and veering from that would cause them to shut down. We’d die.

Then I got a release about Arctic seaweed that was somehow made into food capsules and granules and marketed as a “comprehensive, natural approach to nutritional health.”

I’m sorry, but what’s natural about eating capsules and granules instead of, you know, food?

Then there are all the dumb releases about the “rights” of cattle to roam in pastures and the unmitigated evil of high-fructose corn syrup, but those I’ll save for another column.

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