Making Prepared Foods Healthier Is Easy -- Getting People to Eat Them Is Not
Posted Oct 19 2010 12:00am
One of the key goals in preventive medicine is educating people to eat healthier. This is much more complicated than it seems because the process involves the interplay of an individual's food preferences, cooking skills, the cost of food, and the type and quality of foods available to the consumer in his or her neighborhood. To gain some understanding of this last question, here's an excerpt from an article discussing the manufacture of food and attempts to make it more healthy (see: Making healthy food is easy. Making people eat it is not ):
A serving of Kraft’s Ranch dressing boasts 370 mg of sodium and 12g of fat. That is what nutritionists would describe as “far too much” and consumers would describe as “yummy”. The Kraft food company has brilliant scientists, of course, so it can easily take the salt out of its dressing. Alas, what remains tastes horrible....It has been a hectic year for food companies in America. In April the Institute of Medicine recommended a mandatory limit on the amount of sodium in food. In May Michelle Obama, who frets that American children are too porky, urged the industry to create healthy new products....PepsiCo, Kraft, Kellogg and others have set up a body called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation ....But will anyone eat them? It is individuals, not corporations, who hold the nation’s spoons. Things that are bad for you often taste nice. Remove the fat from cheese and it becomes crumbly. Replace a biscuit’s sugar with artificial sweetener and a scientist must add ingredients to provide bulk and turn the biscuit’s surface brown. By far the most difficult challenge, however, is cutting sodium. Salt not only enhances taste but also acts as a preservative and adds texture. New official guidelines are likely to urge Americans to eat no more than 1,500 mg of sodium each day. Currently they eat more than twice that. PepsiCo is one of many firms to set ambitious goals for sodium reduction—in March it said it would slash 25% of sodium from its main products by 2015. Some firms remove salt furtively, since their customers equate “low-sodium” with “bland”. This summer ConAgra, a food giant, cut 29% of the sodium from its Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, a canned concoction of macaroni and beef, with little fanfare on the label. Campbell’s, another canned-food maker, touts its sodium reductions, but few others do. Charles Vila, vice-president of consumer insights at Campbell’s, describes the shift to less salty nosh as one of the firm’s most important changes since easy-open cans.
In terms of reducing fat and salt in your diet, the best approach is to prepare your own food. You can then add salt in very small amounts at various times in the cooking process to gauge the effect. You will use less of it and the taste won't suffer. Note, however, that all of the discussion above concerns prepared foods for which the manufacturers decide how much salt to add -- reducing the amount while fretting that consumers may balk at buying the changed product. It would be preferable if more people were cooking their own meals and starting with fresh ingredients. This is probably not going to happen for many people for reasons of time, cost, and cooking interests/skills. Probably the best approach for the manufacturers of our prepared foods is the one that they appear to be following. Gradually reduce the salt content in a stealthy, gradual manner. In this way, their customers can get off their salt binge and not necessarily know what is happening. However, the pace at which some of the food manufacturers are proceeding seems to be a little too leisurely for my taste.
One of the key goals in preventive medicine is educating people to eat healthier. This is much more complicated than it seems because the process involves the interplay of an individual's food preferences, cooking skills, the cost of food, and the type and quality of foods available to the consumer in his or her neighborhood. To gain some understanding of this last question, here's an excerpt from an article discussing the manufacture of food and attempts to make it more healthy (see: Making healthy food is easy. Making people eat it is not ):
A serving of Kraft’s Ranch dressing boasts 370 mg of sodium and 12g of fat. That is what nutritionists would describe as “far too much” and consumers would describe as “yummy”. The Kraft food company has brilliant scientists, of course, so it can easily take the salt out of its dressing. Alas, what remains tastes horrible.... It has been a hectic year for food companies in America. In April the Institute of Medicine recommended a mandatory limit on the amount of sodium in food. In May Michelle Obama, who frets that American children are too porky, urged the industry to create healthy new products....PepsiCo, Kraft, Kellogg and others have set up a body called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation ....But will anyone eat them? It is individuals, not corporations, who hold the nation’s spoons. Things that are bad for you often taste nice. Remove the fat from cheese and it becomes crumbly. Replace a biscuit’s sugar with artificial sweetener and a scientist must add ingredients to provide bulk and turn the biscuit’s surface brown. By far the most difficult challenge, however, is cutting sodium. Salt not only enhances taste but also acts as a preservative and adds texture. New official guidelines are likely to urge Americans to eat no more than 1,500 mg of sodium each day. Currently they eat more than twice that. PepsiCo is one of many firms to set ambitious goals for sodium reduction—in March it said it would slash 25% of sodium from its main products by 2015. Some firms remove salt furtively, since their customers equate “low-sodium” with “bland”. This summer ConAgra, a food giant, cut 29% of the sodium from its Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, a canned concoction of macaroni and beef, with little fanfare on the label. Campbell’s, another canned-food maker, touts its sodium reductions, but few others do. Charles Vila, vice-president of consumer insights at Campbell’s, describes the shift to less salty nosh as one of the firm’s most important changes since easy-open cans.In terms of reducing fat and salt in your diet, the best approach is to prepare your own food. You can then add salt in very small amounts at various times in the cooking process to gauge the effect. You will use less of it and the taste won't suffer. Note, however, that all of the discussion above concerns prepared foods for which the manufacturers decide how much salt to add -- reducing the amount while fretting that consumers may balk at buying the changed product. It would be preferable if more people were cooking their own meals and starting with fresh ingredients. This is probably not going to happen for many people for reasons of time, cost, and cooking interests/skills. Probably the best approach for the manufacturers of our prepared foods is the one that they appear to be following. Gradually reduce the salt content in a stealthy, gradual manner. In this way, their customers can get off their salt binge and not necessarily know what is happening. However, the pace at which some of the food manufacturers are proceeding seems to be a little too leisurely for my taste.