The Tastemakers (17 page)

The media has played a tremendous role in growing the “superfood” trend through a fairly predictable cycle. Someone like POM, Kellogg, or Dole would submit a food to a study, and the results of that study would be distilled down to a press-friendly message, which newspapers, magazines, blogs, and morning news shows would deliver verbatim. Studies show that pomegranates contain X and other studies show that X can possibly help with Y, therefore, pomegranates/açai/blueberries/chia could help—hey, maybe even cure—Y. No one traffics in this type of messaging as enthusiastically or successfully as the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz. The cardiac surgeon began combining Western medical advice with naturopathic therapies in the 1990s and first authored a book on the subject in 1999, advocating a balanced lifestyle of exercise and diet to help with common chronic health problems. He became a household name as a regular guest on the
Oprah Winfrey Show
and
Larry King Live
and has hosted the highly rated
Dr. Oz Show
since 2009. It is almost impossible to walk by a supermarket checkout and not see his handsome face, dressed in dark blue scrubs (with plunging v-neck collar), grinning down from a national magazine cover, including his own magazine
Dr. Oz: The Good Life
, which launched earlier this year.

More often than not his show's viewers will find Dr. Oz talking about the top five, ten, or fifteen superfoods we need to be eating
to stop aging or cancer or heart disease, sometimes by himself, and sometimes with regular guests like Dr. John La Puma, his superfoods guru. Oz has pumped up pumpkin seeds (“A food rich in magnesium that helps lower blood pressure and reduces your risk for heart attacks or stroke”), lobbied for leeks (“Just about any part of the allium family has been shown to reduce various types of cancers, including stomach and colorectal cancer, prostate and breast cancers as well as a number of other common cancers”), and touted tahini (“Tahini is made from sesame seeds, a rich source of zinc. And zinc may increase the production of leptin, a hormone that improves metabolism and curbs appetite.”)

He has also cheered for chia. In 2008, appearing on the
Oprah Winfrey Show
, Dr. Oz told women to include chia seeds in their diet (in this case, baked into pumpkin muffins) for their fiber, magnesium, calcium, and Omega-3 fatty acids. In 2011 he said, “chia can substitute for whole grains in your diet … which helps stabilize blood sugar levels in your diet,” and in 2012 he said, “this is the year when you must add chia to your diet,” calling them the “latest superseed” that are a “must-have supplement to your diet” and asking, “is it possible chia seeds have superseded other superfoods?” The effect Oz's endorsement has had on the chia trend can't be understated. He is to superfoods as his mentor Oprah once was to books: If Dr. Oz tells his audience to eat chia, you can bet they'll go out and buy chia seeds the next day. “Without a doubt he's done a lot to elevate the awareness of chia,” said Mamma Chia's owner, Janie Hoffman. “I can't tell you how many people said, ‘Oh yeah, I heard Dr. Oz talk about this!' Even more than
Born to Run
, he's been the most instrumental in this. He moves needles, without a doubt.” Dole has approached Dr. Oz's people to see whether he will promote the Dole Nutrition Plus product line on his show, and seed-exporter Benexia has also worked with his production company to increase the seed's visibility through his endorsement. In the health world today he is the single-most important tastemaker in setting trends.

Inevitably, this has led to substantial criticism about the credibility of Dr. Oz's pronouncements and, indeed, the veracity of the whole notion of superfoods. To many, what Dr. Oz and other
superfood proponents are promoting is ultimately for the greater good: By emphasizing particularly healthful whole foods, they are encouraging people to eat better and more consciously. With so many people in Western countries eating too few fruits and vegetables and too much processed packaged snack foods, the downside from Dr. Oz telling you to eat more chia is far outweighed by the good he's doing. But the idea that there are foods so fundamentally nutritious that they should be eaten in tremendous quantities worries many in the nutrition field. “It's a marketing device,” Marion Nestle told me in an e-mail when I asked her about superfoods. “Nutritionists like me don't recognize any one food as especially super. All unprocessed foods contain a huge range of nutrients but in varying proportions. That's why healthful diets are supposed to contain a range of foods with complementary nutrient contents. The ‘super' designation usually depends on one nutrient or a category of nutrients (antioxidants are a good example). All fruits and vegetables contain antioxidants, so by that standard all are superfoods. This is about marketing, not health.”

We also buy into a narrative, present in each of these health trends, that simplifies a complicated lifestyle down to a single ingredient. The seductive power of many of these superfoods lies in their place in remote, somewhat mystical cultures. Whether it's the longevity of Greek goat herders, Okinawan fishermen, Amazonian tribesmen, or Mexican tribal joggers, the tremendous difference between their health and ours has a hell of a lot more to do with the fact that we drive cars, sit at computers, and have access to supersized sodas than the fact that they eat yogurt, salmon, açai, or chia. (It is also much easier to romanticize these exotic lifestyles rather than, say, actually herd goats every day.) Superfoods exist simply to sell more pomegranates, chia seeds, or other foods that are good for us, even if they are not the fountain of youth. And the inevitability with any of these labels is that they are abused.

POM's boastful claims about the power of pomegranates eventually led to a massive lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission, which ruled that they amounted to false advertising, a case of pure chutzpah extrapolating weak science in order to push more bottles
of juice. “The greater weight of the persuasive expert testimony demonstrates that there is insufficient competent and reliable scientific evidence to substantiate claims that the Pom products treat, prevent or reduce the risk of erectile dysfunction or that they are clinically proven to do so,” a federal judge wrote in his 2012 decision in issuing a twenty-year cease-and-desist order on the type of advertising POM had used to build their market. The European Union went a step further, in 2007 banning outright the use of the term “superfood” unless it is backed by a specific authorized health claim explaining why the product is beneficial to the health of consumers and making clear the effect of other ingredients as well.

If that sounds draconian, keep in mind that most of us know very little about the science behind nutrition and so these buzzwords are powerful drivers. When you have a half-hour to buy groceries, and your kid is screaming in the shopping cart, you're not going to search a number of peer-reviewed studies on your phone while debating what cereal to buy. More likely, you'll pick up the one that says it's enriched with antioxidants or chia, because you heard somewhere those are superfoods, and you don't want to die of cancer, right? Which is how something like clinical research into the effects of antioxidants on various ailments turns into a trend and filters down the food chain until you get a product like 7-Up Antioxidant Cherry, which contains no juices but the same massive amount of refined corn syrup as regular 7-Up. Yes, that is a real product, launched by beverage maker Dr. Pepper Snapple Group in 2009 and removed from shelves in 2013 in the face of a class-action lawsuit alleging false advertising.

“Consumers believe that food is medicine or food can be a silver bullet that cures what ails them,” said Dr. Bruce Chassy, professor emeritus of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois and a fierce critic of the superfoods trend. “They're looking for a magic food to make them healthier, happier, wealthier. Those foods probably don't exist, and while diet changes can help you, I doubt chia or any other food can have any more than a marginal effect. It's no different from nineteenth-century snake oil salesmen. It's got a better coat of varnish on it, but no different.”

“From a nutrition educator's point of view, it's ‘Here we go again,' ” said Chassy regarding each new health and diet trend that emerges. “The message is: eat a balanced diet in moderation, which is totally counter to the message of a superfood, which is basically saying, ‘eat one thing as much as possible.' ” We want to have our cake and eat it, too, and now with chia flour cake mix (selling at twice the price of a normal cake mix), we can eat it without feeling guilty. “What Dr. Oz is doing is very, very bad because it reinforces the mistaken belief that there's a magic answer. The magic answer, you've heard it all! Get sleep, exercise, get a balanced diet. That's what the scientific literature supports. Every time Dr. Oz sells you blueberries and pomegranates, he's selling you snake oil.”

University research into superfoods, whether Dole's work with chia or others looking into olive oil, Greek yogurt, or apples, is diverting attention and resources away from more pressing problems, basically wasting the time of nutrition faculties who gladly accept the funds to conduct studies into margarine's efficacy in lowering cholesterol. It is research that will not fundamentally help humanity aside from those who own shares in Unilever or Kellogg's. Chassy even questioned the value of antioxidants, which may ultimately have some benefit to human health, but this has not been proven in a way that justifies their widespread adoption as a health trend. “We're so used to antioxidants being added to products by producers who believe it'll sell … it becomes part of the food culture. Even though the science hasn't continued to point to real efficacy, it just becomes a matter of fact.”

Back at Dole, Bartlett and Gillitt are fully aware of this, and they are as disdainful of the superfood label's overreach as anyone else. For now Dole is proceeding with caution around chia, rolling it out in the rather reserved Dole Nutrition Plus line and only making specific claims that the studies they've conducted in house can back up. They're not going to claim Dole's chia clusters are curing cancer anytime soon or that they'll allow you to run a marathon. The market will dictate chia's adoption on a wide scale, both at the supply level (prices remain high and the crop is in such demand that Dole is experimenting with growing their own chia on banana plantations)
and at the consumer level, at which people are only willing to pay so much extra for their food. Down the road that might mean that Dole has to put out products with lower levels of chia in them in order to achieve a realistic balance between effective amounts of the seed (which can have a measurable effect on the body) and an amount that won't make their products too expensive for consumers. The danger is that other companies come in and sprinkle a bit of chia seed onto their products to boost sales. Already, ConAgra, the largest processed food manufacturer in the world, was selling an ancient grain flour with chia seeds, and consumer research group Mintel reported a 78 percent increase, compared to the year before, in products with chia in 2012. Though the market at that point was just over $10 million in the United States, Dole already controlled 14 percent of it, and competition was only going to increase as companies piled on to the chia trend's bandwagon.

“It gets saturated at some point,” said Barlett. “When Coca-Cola puts it in their drinks, you're probably done. You hate to see it. It creates confusion and draws other products into question. If chia really takes off, the odds start moving that way.”

With so much of the American population eating poorly and lacking in even basic nutrition, Dole's success with chia could hopefully encourage more people to be conscious of what they're ingesting and maybe even introduce some better eating habits. “Now only three percent of the US population has tried chia,” Barlett said over lunch at a nearby health food restaurant owned by David Murdock, and he believes that even if it takes off as a diet trend in the way that flax did, the price will ensure it will remain a niche. “It is a wonderful, versatile, truly super food, but it is not like you can't get Omega-3, fiber, iron, and calcium from a lot of other less expensive food products.”

Barlett is reassuringly careful. But listening to Chassy, Nestle, and others, I have a hard time not sneering at chia or the latest diet trend. The constant parade of special ingredients and the back and forth between theories so often disproven is exhausting, and maybe the most valuable lesson of goat herders and desert runners
and fishermen is that they eat real foods and balanced diets that include—gasp!—things like gluten. It is not a matter of antioxidant-enhanced soda but an actual piece of fruit that just happens to contain antioxidants. Yet when we go back to the grocery store, there are all the latest fads, exerting their pull on our brains.