Science's Quest to Banish Fat in Tasty Ways - New York Times:
Seems that old ways die hard
"With two-thirds of Americans considered overweight and yet many professing a desire to eat healthier, every major food producer and food-ingredient company has ordered its scientists to find the holy grail: products that either have less bad stuff - fat, white flour, sugar and salt - or more good stuff like whole grains, fiber and fish oil.
Some of these food additives are natural and some are not. But even those that are natural hardly evoke images of a country harvest. Fat-repellent coatings, after all, do not grow on trees.
Coming soon to your grocery store, for example, could be salty corn chips cooked in oil but that are marketed as healthy because the addition of chemically modified starches make them high in fiber. Labeled simply as 'modified cornstarch,' this additive cannot be broken down until it reaches the colon, much like the natural fiber found in fruit and vegetables. Also coming soon: bread containing microscopic capsules of fish oil, enabling food companies to contend that the bread is 'heart-healthy' because of the cholesterol and triglyceride-lowering omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil."
and
""What this does is to turn food into medicine," said Professor Nestle. "Omega-3's occur naturally in food like fish, chicken and eggs, and plants to a lesser extent. Why do we need to get it from bread?"
One reason may be that products that can be marketed as healthier often generate higher sales and fatter profits for food companies. PepsiCo, for instance, reports that sales of its healthier "Smart Spot" items - products like Baked Lay's potato crisps, Tropicana orange juice, Diet Pepsi and Quaker oatmeal - are growing at double the pace of other products.
Foods labeled as healthy also present a show of good faith to administration officials, members of Congress, consumer groups and trial lawyers, who all monitor the food industry's response to the nation's obesity problem. "
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