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2016-11-25 09:25:15
Don t believe the hype about certain 'magical' ingredients they are never as
good as the claims would suggest.
By Bianca Nogrady
24 November 2016
World-changing ideas summit
Google diet and you ll get nearly half-a-billion results in less time than it
takes to swallow. There are diets that tell you to count calories and diets
that tell you to focus on food groups. There are diets that tell you to avoid
carbs and diets that tell you to carbo-load. There are diets that tell you to
eat a handful of blueberries, or a handful of walnuts, or that you should load
all your foods with lemon juice, cinnamon or turmeric. Eggs, potatoes and
full-fat dairy are out, then they re back in.
It s a nutritional version of the lawless wild west , but it s also a whole
lot of sound and fury that achieves nothing, nutritionist Rosemary Stanton told
the audience at the BBC Future World-Changing Ideas Summit in Sydney last week.
The super foods fad is yet another sign of the never-ending search for a magic
bullet to solve problems, she says. Such thinking, which ignores the
multi-factorial nature of diet-related health problems, is probably the
greatest myth.
A big problem is our focus on individual nutrients or ingredients. Stanton
argues this takes the focus away from fresh produce and towards processed
foods. Our fixation with specific vitamins or mineral also creates an
environment in which manufacturers can add nutrients to food and make health
claims for those foods.
Stanton is yet to find an Australian deficient in the sort of nutrients that go
into fortified cereals
Then it achieves a health halo and it sells, and you see this with heavily
sweetened breakfast cereals, Stanton says. I get concerned when people find
that something s good then they stick it in their Coco Pops. Stanton points
out that she is yet to find an Australian deficient in the sort of nutrients
that go into fortified cereals.
There is one ingredient that Stanton is happy to single out: sugar. She argues
that a sugar tax is low-hanging fruit that governments would be foolish not
to pick. But the food industry around the world has been fighting
tooth-and-nail against such an approach, which Stanton takes as a sign of
encouragement. Whenever the processed food industry opposes something
vehemently, I ve got a pretty good idea it would work.
In general, Stanton argues that the same age-old dietary wisdom still holds:
lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, small amounts of protein,
particularly fish and seafood. For this reason, the Mediterranean diet is often
upheld by many as the closest thing to a dietary magic bullet, heavy in
plant-based foods and oily fish.
The chair of the discussion at WCIS was BBC TV presenter Michael Mosley, who
has argued that regularly fasting for a couple of days a week (the so-called
5-2 diet) can improve our health. View the video below in which Mosley explains
his reasoning:
Seaweed pasta
Despite Stanton's objection to painting those so-called 'superfoods' as a
nutritional panacea, she supports efforts to find new, environmentally
sustainable sources of food as part of a balanced diet. Marine ecologist Pia
Winberg from Venus Shell Systems offered one option at the BBC Future
World-Changing Ideas Summit, when she presented a convincing argument that
seaweed could become a major component of food in the future.
Her involvement with seaweed began with projects using seaweeds to clean up
nutrient waste along coastlines. But when she and other began realising the
nutritional value of seaweed, their focus shifted to food. The seaweed Winberg
and colleagues cultivate is not only a rich source of protein, it also provides
omega-3 fatty acids, fibre, anti-oxidants and an array of vitamins and
minerals. For this reason, it could be a sustainable alternative to fish and
other kinds of seafood.
The challenge is how to get something like seaweed into the diet of an
individual more familiar with food that comes in polystyrene containers. We
need to make it easy for mainstream individuals to eat, rather than try to
change their practices, Winberg told the Summit. To achieve that, they ve
developed an extract of the seaweed, containing all the important ingredients,
which can be put into existing foods such as pasta.
The cultivation of seaweed as a foodstuff can also have environmental benefits
beyond taking pressure off exhausted fish stocks. Creating seaweed industries
is a great incentive to maintain clean coastlines, Winberg says.