Popeye Was Wrong

Have you noticed that whenever the Food Police looks at a new study, however faulty, and pronounces a particular food “good” or “bad” (Chocolate cures cancer! Coffee prevents diabetes!), that the media runs with it faster than you can say antioxidant?

Then a massive public relations campaign ensues – the Avocado Board or the National Associated of Dairy Farmers or the American Cabal of Salty Snack Food Pushers – educating the previously ignorant public that if they only had five or six servings of their particular food each day, then they’d live to be a hundred and get a better job and have to fight sexy young things off their doorsteps with broom handles?

Worse is if the study (Ten eighteen year old male college freshmen were studied over a two month period and it was found that a steady diet of pizza and video games not only cured depression but improved their hand-eye coordination and prevented unwanted pregnancies!) pinpoints a particular vitamin, mineral or nutrient.

Then, after the Food Police blankets the media with press releases, food processors start adding that vitamin, mineral or nutrient to their product. No matter how inappropriate, effective or just plain ridiculous that addition might be.

After fluoridation of drinking water, probably the earliest incident of dietary
“enhancement” would be enriched flours, then adding vitamins to processed dry cereals. Which on the surface seems appropriate, and even a good thing (hey, at least those finicky-eater kids are getting something nutritious with their Cap’n Crunch). But think about it: we process the living daylights out of perfectly good, healthy, whole foods, then supplement them with vitamins and minerals, then pat ourselves on the back for giving our families a “vitamin-enriched” diet. Problem is that some vitamins and minerals don’t like each other, and the proportions of nutrients added back into foods isn’t necessarily the proportion that works best as found in foods in their natural habitat.

Then they started messing with the orange juice. Folic acid was found to be good for pregnant women so it was added to the orange juice, but what nobody seemed to tell the women was that folic acid is a B vitamin that is meant to work in correct proportions with the other B vitamins, so who knows how much folate they would actually be absorbing.

Then calcium was the shiny new kid in town and that got added to the orange juice. Which seemed odd, but not totally ridiculous. For a time, I even drank it, as I’m sensitive to dairy products. But milk with added calcium? What, we had a boatload of calcium sitting in a warehouse that the Red Cross couldn’t give to some starving children? Kids are growing up in Africa with malformed bones and we’re adding CALCIUM to our MILK?

Somebody needs to be slapped for that decision.

Then antioxidants were our new savior. They were added to everything. Until it was determined that antioxidants on their own were shown not to prevent cancer.

Then it was soy.

And it went on like this for a while, and now, with the dietary news item that naturopaths and nutritionists have known for years, that Omega-3 fats (fish oils, canola oil, walnuts, flax seed, etc.) are better for you than trans-fats, the rage for Frankenfoods seems to know no boundaries.

You can now buy eggs with added Omega-3. Butter substitutes with fish oil. And on, and on, and on. I started to wonder, “Why bother eating food at all? Why not just wait until all of our daily dietary requirements are compressed into easily dispensed tablets, like in science fiction books and movies?”

But, for now, people still like to eat and feel much better knowing that their junk food of choice has some redeeming qualities.

OK, I can sort of live with that. For now, we still have free will and, except in Manhattan, can choose what we put in our bodies.

But something I saw recently really got my feathers ruffled. It was an ad in a women’s magazine, announcing “Diet Coke Plus…now with vitamins and minerals!”

Oh. My. God. Let’s take a product that can dissolve tooth enamel and remove rust from your bicycle chain and fortify it with vitamins and minerals that probably, once added to the can, don’t stand a chance of outliving Kevin Federline’s career.

Who thought this one up, the same people who brought us “Manimal?” (Google it, kids)

And anyway, where are the people who used to tell us that buying vitamin and mineral supplements was overkill because if we eat well, we’ll get all the nutrients our bodies need?

Either they’ve finally realized that our soils are depleted and our foods don’t have the RDA of vitamins and minerals that they once did in our great-grandparent’s day, or they’ve copped to the daily diet of the average American adult, which is composed of sugar, white flour and caffeine?

At least we can breathe a sigh of relief that the white flour is fortified with twelve vitamins and iron to make us strong.

And speaking of iron, Popeye had it all wrong. The oxalic acid in spinach counteracts the iron, making it just another green, leafy vegetable containing other nutrients, but don’t count on it when Bluto’s on the rampage.

For that, you’re just going to have to drink your folic acid and calcium-enriched orange juice.