A drink to your health? Well, maybe.

By Kathy Egan, RD

Wonder how to make a million in tough economic times? Simple: Sell a consumable repeat-purchase product that implies it will create a sense of well being.

Nutraceuticals and functional food products fit this bill amazingly well.  Consumers will pay $3, $4 or even $5 or more for a 16-ounce (or less) bottle of flavored water or juice mix spiked with dietary supplements –and the actual manufacturing cost is pennies per bottle.

These things go in cycles. First we had energy boosters. Now, drinks that promise to calm us down.

A recent New York Times piece, “Skip the Scotch, Just Have a Swig of Mellowberry” by Stephanie Rosenbloom reported on this latest trend in supplement spiked beverages: relaxation drinks.

Rosenbloom writes:

There are already more than 350 kinds of relaxation drinks on the market, according to Agata Kaczanowska, an analyst with the research company IBISWorld. Instead of slogans like Jolt’s “All the sugar and twice the caffeine,” these new drinks proffer serenity with maxims like Unwind’s “Tired of being wired?” and Drank’s “Slow your roll.”

Yes, many of us could use a slower roll, but can it be proffered in a bottle?

Some of the more than 1, 200 supplement containing beverage on sale in North America

Marketers know just how to launch these products. They know that the initial consumer reaction must be good, but not too good. These products do best flying under the radar long enough to get a group following before the experts have a chance to weigh in on them.  Then, after lots of people are using a product, consumers fall prey to false logic, i.e. it must be okay if so many people are using it.

Yet, as Rosenbloom points out, these drinks are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

What’s a wanna-be slow-roller to do? For starters, eyeball the marketing materials. Careful reading of labels reveals that these product claims are subtly worded to allude to the desired result.  Most companies are savvy enough to avoid legally defined health/ nutrition claims. (For more information on health-claim regulation, go to the FDA website.)

Ultimately, any discussion of functional foods comes back to the two main issues around dietary supplements:

Are they what they say they are? And does the ingredient really perform the desired function?

Consumers are often lulled into a false sense of security when the product is a food or drink.  We’re not suspicious of fortified foods because Americans have been buying them since white flour became “enriched” in the 1940s. Today, an average consumer will swallow a variety of dietary supplements in the form of breakfast cereal, energy bars, juice  and milk.

There are two main resources for those interested in verifying the safety of their supplements: U.S. Pharmacopia. U.S. Pharmacopia will verify supplements and allow them to display the USP mark.  (For a list of approved brands, click here.)

NSF International has a more extensive and searchable listing of dietary supplements deemed safe  .  While USP focuses on the veracity of the ingredients, NSF emphasizes safety.

My advice: if you are interested in taking supplements–make a deliberate, educated choice based on dietary needs, weighing benefits against risks or unknowns.  Talking to a physician or nurse practitioner is wise, of course. But don’t stop there: If you don’t know how to decide what supplements might be beneficial for you, see a Registered Dietitian.

(Kathy Egan is The Food Watchdog’s resident “renaissance dietitian” and senior writer. Click here for more of her bio.)

Absence of food labeling laws keep U.S. consumers from knowing whether or not their food is genetically altered.

Back a couple of months, a couple of you asked how you could determine whether or not your food contained genetically modified organisms. It took a while, but I found a bit of information that might help you better understand this bomb-filled arena, or just add to your confusion.

Here’s one point that’s indisputable. It is difficult for consumers to know whether the food they’re buying was genetically modified, especially in this country. Most of the industrialized countries demand that GMO products be labeled as such. But not the U.S.

The Pew Research Foundation reported that more than 90 percent of American shoppers want food labeled as to its contents, including GMO. Unless I missed it, there was nothing in the farm bill that finally passed last week that will give us a clue to the presence of GM ingredients.
GMO By Rediscover Biology

Monsanto, which has a chokehold on the world’s use of genetically modified seeds, is now using its extensive network of lawyers and lobbyists to pressure state agriculture agencies not to allow milk producers to label dairy products as not coming from cows fed with GM food or bovine growth hormone.

To learn more about Monsanto, check out this link to Don Barlett and Jim Steele’s very well done and balanced investigative report in this month’s Vanity Fair.

As with almost everything controversial, all the opinions on GMO have to be weighed by considering the source of the information. The Institute for Responsible Technology makes no pretense about its concern over the danger of using genetically modified substances in our food.

The institute, founded in 2003 by Jeffery Smith, the author of “Seeds of Deception,” says many consumers in the U.S. mistakenly believe that the FDA approves GM foods through rigorous, in-depth, long-term studies. In reality, the agency has absolutely no safety testing requirements.

Smith says it’s easy to understand the FDA’s industry-friendly policy on regulation of GMOs when you see the revolving door between agency regulators and the companies they regulate.

The FDA has claimed it was not aware of any information showing that GM crops were different “in any meaningful or uniform way” from non-GMO crops and therefore didn’t require testing. But Smith says that 44,000 internal FDA documents made public by a lawsuit show that this was not true.

But getting back to the original question of how to identify GMO-tainted food, the institute has released a four-page guide on what to watch out for, including a lengthy list of food items containing GM ingredients.

The guide and other GMO information can be found at the institute’s Web site at this link.

As expected, Monsanto says its processes are safe and beneficial and it “helps farmers grow food more efficiently and in a more sustainable manner. We do this through science and the development of agricultural technology. Our products have changed the way food is grown, to the benefit of both farmers and consumers,” its Web site states.

For the rest of the story, or at least Monsanto’s side of the GMO issue, this link will take you to a long list of stories that the worldwide chemical company has presented on its position.

Good luck sorting through all of this.

Wouldn’t shopping be an easier and possibly safer chore if all food were properly labeled?