lesson 11
                                 Medicines May Soon Come in the Form of Food
If Western people think they are healthy eaters, they will have to think again. The no cholesterol, low-fat, high-fiber, calcium-enriched,sugar-less,peservative-additive-color-free-with-added-vitamins diet is about to become a passing fashion. The new “buzz word” in the food industry is nutraceuticals-foods that provide medical benefits as well as traditional nutrients.

“Imagine a supermarket where each food category is subdivided into categories for those consumers who have back problems, are at risk from cardiovascular disease, obesity, arthritis and other diseases,” says Mark Braman, president of the American food company Omega Tech. “Imagine great-tasting foods that help protect the body from major diseases and environmental damage.”

That vision is starting to become a reality. Last year in Britain, the chemical company Roche launched Startup, a fruit juice that contains twice as many vitamins as milk. Multinational food giant Nestle is marketing a yogurt fortified with ingredients that rid the body of bacteria.

In the new millennium, natural foods won’t be able to compete with bio-engineered and processed foods. The lycopene discovery is a case in point. Processed tomato products containing oil that facilitates the absorption of lycopene are better than eating the real thing, raw tomatoes.

The conventional wisdom, however, is that, if you have a well-balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, you’ll get all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients you need for a healthy body. Supplements, nutritionists often claim, are a waste of money.

According to Dr Sheldon Saul Hendler, nutritional adviser to the US Olympic Committee, vitamin and mineral deficiencies occur in healthy individuals eating generally adequate diets. In The Doctor’s Vitamin and Mineral Encyclopedia, he writes: “There is growing evidence that substances in our ‘well-balanced’ diets contribute to cancer and other degenerative diseases. A vitamin and mineral supplement is recommended for even healthy individuals as a key element in the prevention of many of these degenerative diseases.”

The trick is to know which vitamins and minerals you need to supplement. Some of that guesswork may be eliminated by the introduction of more vitamin and mineral-enriched foods. In Australia, scientists want to lace beer with thiamine (vitamin B1) to reduce the instance of Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a potentially fatal brain disorder found in heavy drinkers.

Vitamin and mineral-enriched foods, however, may also create problems through over-dosing and interaction. The optimal dose for many vitamins and minerals is unknown and some can be toxic in high doses. If you find yourself unaccountably laughing, for instance, you could be overdosing on manganese. Manganese madness is a recognized disorder that can produce manic states followed by deep depression.

As nutraceuticals or functional foods start to fill the supermarket shelves, it will become harder to work out exactly what dosage of vitamins and minerals we are ingesting or what effect it is having on us. The line between food and medicine will become increasingly blurred, and the health claims more imaginative. Most food companies are reluctant to have their product categorized as a medicine, because of the requirement for expensive research and lengthy clinical trials. In the US and Europe, nutraceuticals exist in a regulatory twilight zone. Problems aside, though, the mew revolution in food could produce some useful lifestyle products.