Chew on This: Whose food healthier? Nature's or the food biz?
It used to be we asked no more of food than to make us feel full or cosseted or impressed by its skilful execution. Now we expect food to do more than just fill our stomachs. It’s got to have added value as a health remedy. We demand additives in the most unlikely of products, to cure us of existing frailties or protect us against the offset of new ones. It’s not enough to eat salmon or mackerel at least once a week to get our omega-3 fatty acids. We want them delivered by other means than a fish.
Tropicana offers orange juice that hasn’t just got more or less pulp in it. It’s got omega-3. Omega Farms, which adds the stuff -- in case its brand name didn’t make it clear -- to the cheese and milk it sells, is also boosting its orange juice and yogurt with omega-3. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (known be me as S’Not for short) introduced its Mediterranean Blend with the boast that it contains 400 milligrams of Omega-3 in every serving. Smear that on a slice of toast to dip into your Eggland's Best boiled egg from a hen that's been chowing down on feed soused in canola oil, and you add a further 100 milligrams of Omega-3 to your intake. An egg from a hen not on this diet will only deliver 37 milligrams. Start your breakfast with a cup of one of the cereals boosted with extra omega-3 and you up your total by another 500 milligrams or so.
You’ll be swimming to work like a fish, all flapping gills.
In 2004, roughly 250 foods contained added omega-3 last year. By 2007 that figure jumped to more than 250. Four out of 10 adults are looking to cut the risk of heart disease by adding more omega-3s to their diets. The fatty acid primarily found in flax and hemp seed, some nuts, and oily fish such as salmon, mackerel and herring, has also been thought to cut risk of other diseases, like Alzheimer’s.
But if we stuck to eating like our grandparents did, we probably wouldn’t have to rely on
scientists to tamper with our food to keep us healthy. Grandma may have been a little vague as to why she put carrots on the plate (“They’ll help you see in the dark, dear”), or served up spinach (“Makes you strong”) and bullied us to finish our greens, swallow our milk, eat some cheese (“Don’t you want to grow tall?”), but instinctively she understood the principle of eating properly. A well-balanced diet of good fresh food, simply cooked would produce sound minds in healthy bodies.
By all means add those omega-3-enriched foods to your diet. But don’t ignore nature’s
skill in delivering, untampered, all the nutrients, minerals, proteins and vitamins we need, in their original state.
Posted on Thursday 03rd July 2008 in
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