The burgeoning practice of using herbs, roots and natural remedies to enhance moods, prevent colds and boost energy has taken a new turn with the introduction of "nutraceutical" or "functional foods."
Herbs are being added to snack foods like corn chips, ice cream and even breads, fruit juice, soups, and pasta.
For instance, shoppers at Wild Oats Market can choose between Power Puffs With Ginseng ($2.59) and Echinacea Shells ($2.39), both made by Robert's American Gourmet, which also makes St. John's Wort Tortil-la Chips. King Soopers and Safeway stores carry Ben and Jerry's Frozen Smoothies with chamomile, echinacea and ginseng ($2.39).
Even mainstream brands are getting into the act. Juice-maker Langer's offers Raspberry-Cranberry 100, with ginkgo biloba and ginseng, and Coldbuster 100, an orange-juice blend with echinacea and zinc ($3.49 for 64 ounces).
These nutraceuticals, capitalizing on the $10-billion- a-year dietary supplement business, "represent a triumph of marketing ingenuity," says Consumer Reports on Health in its June newsletter. "Such products are flooding the market due largely to relaxed and fuzzy rules governing what's allowed in foods and what their manufacturers can say about them."
The touted herbs are, by themselves, intended to treat or prevent diseases or symptoms, Consumer Reports says. For instance, St. John's wort commonly is taken to relieve symptoms of depression. Echinacea is supposed to boost the immune system. And ginkgo biloba is supposed to improve memory by increasing blood flow to the brain.
But the herb content in these food products is so small it's probably ineffective, and if it were included in large amounts it possible could be harmful if someone consumed a whole package of chips, particularly while drinking alcohol or taking medications, Consumer Reports notes.
Also the products, while including these supposedly beneficial ingredients, still contain high amounts of refined flour, sugar and fattts.
BBut that doesn't stop manufacturers from making health claims.
Robert's American Gourmet Echinacea Shells, for example, carry exhortations, such as "LOW FAT," "YES," "Good KARMA" and "THEY FLY." The label declares a calorie count of 120 per 1-ounce serving (14 of which come from fat), but there is no information on the echinacea dosage per serving.
Instead, a block of tiny, italicized type announces: "Echinacea facilitates the healing process and is used as a blood purifier and can be an effective antibiotic."
The herb added to Hain's Chunky Tomato soup with St. John's wort consists of stems, but the herb's true active ingredient is found in leaves and flowers.
"NIH does have some concerns about them and we are looking into them, especially the potential for interaction (with other medications)," says Dr. Terri Krakower, nutritional biochemist and National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements spokesperson. "We advise anyone who uses them to talk to their physician."
"They (functional foods) are so new we don't know yet if they are good, bad or indifferent," Krakower says. But anyone taking these supplements, whether in pill form or in foods, should "do their homework" and thoroughly research them, and not just rely on health claims made by manufacturers, she says.
One way to do that is to access the NIH database (http://dietary- supplements.info.nih.gov), which has extensive information on vitamins, minerals and botanicals that can be downloaded for free.
Congress allows manufacturers to make certain claims without Food Drug Administration approval, provided they don't actually mention a specific disease. But Consumer Reports says "an impressive-sounding ingredient doesn't necessarily turn junk food into a desirable food," and sometimes the regulations are ignored.
In 1994, Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which set up a new framework for FDA regulation of dietary supplementtss, including labe
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a doctor before self- prescribing herbal supplements. In particular, pregnant or breast- feeding women, the chronically ill, elderly, children younger than 18 and people taking prescription or over-the-counter medicines should be wary.
Varro Tyler, professor emeritus of pharmacognosy at Purdue University, notes that ginkgo biloba can thin the blood, which can be hazardous for people taking prescription medicines that also thin the blood.
Failing to label the packages with the precise amounts of the herbs inside is just one of the criticisms that Dr. George Blackburn levies against nutraceutical foods. He is associate editor of HealthNews, published by the New England Journal of Medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Nutrition in Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at the Harvard Medical School.
"The increasing number of products designed by manufacturers with specific health benefits in mind is making the grocery store look more and more like a pharmacy. Unlike a drug, though, functional foods are available without a prescription and often without much guidance on how they should be used," Blackburn says.
"It's unlikely that anyone drinking calcium-fortified orange juice will get too much calcium, and we know a lot about how that key ingredient works. But with some of the more questionable products, juices fortified with the herb echinacea for example, no one yet knows what level of intake is safe or how the substance might interact with other medications."
Blackburn also complains that the work of traditional healers and herbalists is being distorted and misrepresented by nutraceutical marketeers.
"Mixing all these things (for general consumption and marketing purposes) is not the way the herbalists, the Asians or the traditional healers ever did this," Blackburn says.
- The New York Daily News contributed to this report.
- BY : Dru Wilson
- SOURCE : Colorado Springs Gazette1999.07.20
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