Vitamins Hide the Low Quality of Our Food - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
we fail to notice that food marketers use synthetic vitamins to sell unhealthful products. Not only have we become dependent on these synthetic vitamins to keep ourselves safe from deficiencies, but the eating habits they encourage are having disastrous consequences on our health.
-
vitamins spread from the labs of scientists to the offices of food marketers, and began to take on a life of their own.
-
Nutritionists are correct when they tell us that most of us don’t need to be taking multivitamins. But that’s only because multiple vitamins have already been added to our food.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
Given the poor quality of the typical American diet, this fortification is far from superfluous. In fact, for products like milk and flour, where fortification and enrichment have occurred for so long that they’ve become invisible, it would be almost irresponsible not to add synthetic vitamins.
-
synthetic vitamins are as essential to food companies as they are to us. To be successful in today’s market, food manufacturers must create products that can be easily transported over long distances and stored for extended periods.
-
They also need to be sure that their products offer some nutritional value so that customers don’t have to go elsewhere to meet their vitamin needs. But the very processing that’s necessary to create long shelf lives destroys vitamins, among other important nutrients. It’s nearly impossible to create foods that can sit for months in a supermarket that are also naturally vitamin-rich.
-
Today, it would be easy to blame food marketers for using vitamins to deceive us into buying their products. But our blindness is largely our own fault.
-
we’ve entered into a complicit agreement with them: They depend on us to buy their products, and we depend on the synthetic vitamins they add to those products to support eating habits that might otherwise leave us deficient
-
extra vitamins do not protect us from the long-term “diseases of civilization” that are currently ravaging our country, including obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes — many of which are strongly associated with diet.
-
natural foods contain potentially protective substances such as phytochemicals and polyunsaturated fat that also are affected by processing, but that are not usually replaced. If these turn out to be as important as many researchers suspect, then our exclusive focus on vitamins could mean we’re protecting ourselves against the wrong dangers. It’s as if we’re taking out earthquake insurance policies in an area more at risk for floods.
-
And adding back vitamins after the fact ignores the issue of synergy: how nutrients work naturally as opposed to when they are isolated. A 2011 study on broccoli, for example, found that giving subjects fresh broccoli florets led them to absorb and metabolize seven times more of the anticancer compounds known as glucosinolates, present in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables
-
And yet we refuse to change our eating habits in the ways that would actually protect us, which would require refocusing our diets on minimally processed foods that are naturally nutrient-rich.
-
The popularity of dietary supplements and vitamin-enhanced processed “health” foods means that even those of us who try to do right by our health are often getting it wrong.
-
we mustn’t let it distract us from an even more fundamental question: how we’ve allowed the word “vitamin” to become synonymous with “health.”