Don't believe the myth of magic food

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BY MARK ANDERSEN / Lincoln Journal Star

Superfoods won’t perform miracles, nutritionists say.

Drinking acai berry juice, the latest trendy superfood, won’t magically help you shed pounds or cleanse your body of toxins. It won’t strip years from your appearance.

The South American berry almost certainly won’t prove more miraculous than oat bran, a craze of the late 1980s. Although, like oat bran, acai berries may contribute to better health in some small way.

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Be wary of trendy 'superfoods' that claim be healthy miracles. Instead, eat a balanced diet of foods - real, actual foods such as fruits and vegetables. (MCT file illustration)

Be wary of trendy 'superfoods' that claim be healthy miracles. Instead, eat a balanced diet of foods - real, actual foods such as fruits and vegetables. (MCT file illustration)

But that’s not what people want to hear. We want foods to make us healthy — and now.

There’s this belief, says UNL nutrition professor Wanda Koszewski, “that somewhere out there is a magic food, and if I eat it, then I will get all the nutrition I need and it will make me thin and beautiful.”

And it’s a myth, she says.

“I think we’re looking for this quick and easy way of staying healthy,” Koszewski says. “A lot of people are looking for the magic pill.”

But food isn’t a wonder drug.

Instead, the best eating advice, based on what nutritionists have learned about food and its role in our health: Eat a balanced diet. And quantity matters.

Yep, it’s basic — and boring.

Science journalist and food writer Michael Pollan distills his nutrition message to seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Pollan’s New York Times essay, “Unhappy Meals,” began with those words and continued for 10,000 more, mostly to reacquaint Americans with the concept of food.

Focus on eating what your great-grandmother would have recognized as food, he says. And under that definition, many things on grocery store shelves do not qualify.

That’s because food companies focus on selling processed items that tout being low cholesterol, high-fiber or chock full of antioxidants.

These synthesized food stuffs get assigned the properties of medications. And if a little is good, we want to assume that more is better.

For example, said Marilynn Schnepf, professor and head of UNL’s department of nutrition and health science, “It follows that if eating fish is good for me, then why not eat an omega 3 fatty acid supplement?”

But that’s not the right answer.

First off, Schnepf says, maybe it’s not the omega 3 that makes fish healthy.

“We don’t know all the reasons fish are good for us,” Schnepf says. “It could be the omega 3s — it probably is — but could it also be something else?”

Could the omega 3s be beneficial only in the presence of something else not yet discovered? Might omega 3s only be beneficial in moderation?

The answer: We don’t know.

“Nutrition is not even 100 years old as a science,” Koszewski says. “We are learning things every day through research. Nobody can tell us yet that there’s one perfect food. It’s not out there.”

That’s why nutrition advice can shift so dramatically. One example: Margarine, introduced as a healthy substitute to butter, turned out to have unhealthy consequences.

Another, more recent example: touting foods with antioxidant qualities. Antioxidants slow oxidation. In humans, oxidation produces free radicals, which can damage cells and possibly initiate cancer.

So foodmakers packed foods with antioxidants. And then science spoiled the marketing.

In one Finnish study, Schnepf says, it turned out that smokers taking one antioxidant, beta carotene, died at higher rates than those who did not.

“I was on a study, and our researcher immediately took us off beta carotene,” Schnepf says.

People in other antioxidant studies showed no improvement.

So maybe it’s not beta carotene, Schnepf says. Or maybe it’s the beta carotene combined with something else or with five or six “something-elses.”

“What’s the balance of all those antioxidants?” Schnepf asks. “If we overconsume one, what’s that do to the others?”

Clearly, nutrition fits somewhere in the big picture of optimal health, but nobody knows quite where.

And we’re impatient for answers. “We’ve always looked for the quick answer,” Schnepf says.

So we ride the cycle of food hype and disappointment, and then when it doesn’t work, we blame the scientists.

The better plan: Eat a balanced diet.

“Whatever dietary changes we make have to be changes we can live with forever,” Schnepf said.

“Instead of going on the grapefruit diet, substitute grapefruit for the Snickers.”

Don’t swallow the hype on the side of the package.

Remember: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And think of your great-grandmother.

Reach Mark Andersen at 473-7238 or mandersen@journalstar.com.