Confusion Growing as Food Firms Tout Health

As an occupational therapist who works in Los Angeles with nutritionists and other professionals to help rehabilitate patients with heart diseases, Melissa Welch is privy to some very good advice on eating for health.

Both as a professional and as a consumer concerned about her own well-being, Welch says she welcomes efforts by food manufacturers to limit or eliminate harmful ingredients in food. But as she views advertising promoting these so-called healthier foods, Welch says she finds more confusion than enlightenment.

“I don’t think many people are very aware of the ingredients and what they mean,” she said. “I think the manufacturers are making things a little bit more confusing.” In many cases, she says, advertising focuses on a fact that doesn’t tell the whole story.

New Buzz Word

“Just because something is low cholesterol doesn’t mean that it is low fat,” she says, explaining that her concern is limiting the total fat in her diet as well as the cholesterol. She says she’s seen packages in the grocery store with “no cholesterol” prominently displayed on “food that wouldn’t ordinarily have cholesterol in it anyway. That doesn’t mean it’s healthy.”

No matter. Cholesterol has become one of those food marketing buzz words that strike a chord among Americans traumatized by the prevalence of heart disease in the society. The concern strikes elderly couples coping with a spouse’s heart attack as well as 35-year-old, healthy, hard-driving yuppies who are afraid they might not get to enjoy the megabucks made from the latest merger deal.

The right words have proven highly effective for manufacturers that want to communicate to worried consumers that they understand the concern and are trying to help make things better. Regardless of whether the marketing tells the entire story, consumers will hear a lot more of the theme in the future, according to those who watch the food industry.

“About a year ago when we finished our 1987 data, we said that fat, cholesterol and oat bran would be the buzz words (in food marketing) for 1988,” says Lynn Dornblaser, general manager of Gorman’s New Product News, a Chicago-based trade publication that keeps track of new food products.

Surveying new products, she adds, “they will definitely continue to be the major buzz words for 1989. The trend hasn’t begun to peak.” Preservatives, sodium, fiber and tropical oils are also issues consumers will be hearing a lot about.

Manufacturers have a record of success to bolster their confidence that focusing on health is smart marketing. Take, for example, what happened to breakfast cereals in 1988 as manufacturers touted studies showing that oat bran reduces cholesterol levels. This was the year that General Mills put a blue banner on Cheerios--a product usually aimed at children--to tell adults that the cereal has been a source of oat bran for 50 years. It was also the year that any manufacturer that could tout the fiber or vitamin content of cereal did so with gusto.

Some 97 new cereal products were introduced in 1988, Dornblaser says. “I would say that half of them were promoted as being good for us as opposed to just sugar aimed at children,” she says.

The sales of hot cereals alone grew 25% last year, says Kurt Feuerman, an analyst with Drexel Burnham Lambert in New York. “That is a huge number for one year.”

Capacity Overloads

Cold cereals also made healthy gains, says June D. Page, an analyst with Bear, Stearns & Co. in New York. Additionally, Page says, consumers perceived cereals with oats, fiber and extra vitamins as having value added and were willing to pay premium prices. “We’re going to see a lot more new cereals in 1989,” she says.

Some cereal manufacturers are running into manufacturing capacity problems, Page says.

Quaker Oats has stopped advertising its oat bran cereal because it can’t meet demand, says spokesman Ron Bottrell. The 1988 advertising budget for the cereal “was zero,” he says, adding that the media wrote so much about oat bran cholesterol studies that the company didn’t have to promote the cereal.

Quaker’s oatmeal also benefited without much advertising, Bottrell says. Up until about a year ago, hot cereal was a small niche market of which Quaker held about a 1% share, primarily with its oatmeal. Today it has 4% to 5%, he adds.

Health groups and medical experts are encouraging--and sometimes rewarding--manufacturers who take steps to improve the quality of their foods. The National Heart Assn. decided last year that makers of processed foods that meet guidelines on salt, cholesterol and fat content can put the association’s “heart healthy” seal of approval on their packaging.

At the same time, some health experts view health-related food promotions warily. In some cases, they say, manufacturers are making claims based on incomplete and contradictory information. While some studies show drastic reductions in cholesterol from dietary changes alone, others found only modest cholesterol reductions.

“Right now, there’s a lot of hype about oat bran and cholesterol,” said Urban Robbins, a retired electronics worker who lives in northern Riverside County. He said he thinks he has a better source of information about cholesterol.

“I have the ‘Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.’ It’s a book that I almost have memorized,” Robbins says. The book includes a lot of details about how food is changed chemically in the body and particularly how cholesterol is formed.

On the oat bran front, Linda Van Horn, assistant professor of community health and preventive medicine at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, found that the average person needs to eat 35 grams, or about two-thirds of a cup, of oat bran or oatmeal every day to lower cholesterol just 3%.

Studies Incomplete

The debate took on an added dimension recently as a result of a group of major snack-food companies deciding to remove tropical oils, such as coconut, palm and palm kernel oils, from many of their food formulas. They took action after an unusually aggressive consumer campaign against the oils.

The National Heart Savers Assn. complained in a series of newspaper ads that tropical oils, while containing no cholesterol, are high in saturated fats that help boost cholesterol levels.

But some health experts have joined producers of palm oil, in particular, in arguing that consumers and manufacturers have overreacted. The leading voice of protest is the Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia, a Southeast Asian nation that is a major exporter of palm oil.

Rachel Grinker Stern, a nutritionist based in Leonia, N.J., who has done some contract work for the institute, acknowledges that the institute’s arguments may be viewed skeptically because of Malaysia’s critical export interest. But, she argues, other credible, though limited, research exists suggesting that palm oil not only doesn’t raise cholesterol levels but may lower levels, perhaps because it does not behave as a saturated fat.

The important point, says Stern, is that palm oil “just hasn’t been studied enough” to draw broad conclusions. The anti-tropical oil movement has gone too far, she says.

“All of the infant formula people have come under attack because their products contain coconut oil,” she says. “I think that illustrates how hysterical people have become. The reason they use it is because you get a fat that is similar to mothers milk.”

Moreover, the government of Malaysia argues that negative reports on palm oils in the United States may cause a decline in the use of the oil in other parts of the world. This is important, officials say, because there are several countries that do not have the heart disease problem of the United States where palm oil has been a factor in preventing and treating Vitamin A deficiency.

Competition Prevails

On another level, independent health experts argue that whether good or bad, tropical oils are a non-issue in the United States because they are an insignificant factor in the American diet. (Palm oil supporters say the oil wasn’t introduced in the United States until the late 1960s, after the nation’s rate of heart attack had peaked and started to decline.)

That is essentially the position taken by the Food and Drug Administration in testimony before Congress on whether tropical oils should be labeled as saturated fats. Agency officials say the oils are not worth singling out because all three together make up only 3.5% of the total fat in the U.S. food supply.

“The average individual intake is less than 4 grams per day. Tropical oils make up less than 2% of individual calorie intake,” the agency’s statement says.

Such fine points may be irrelevant once market forces are put into motion. James Echeandia, a snack foods consultant and publisher of Confectioner magazine, says companies have moved swiftly in the past when public tastes changed.

Crackers used to be made with animal fat, he says, until one company started promoting crackers made with vegetable oil. “Everybody decided that it was a competitive advantage and everybody switched,” he says.

The same thing happened when someone decided to take preservatives out of potato chips, he says. Now that the ball is rolling on tropical oils, he says, the entire industry will likely change.

A Close Look at Labeling

Cholesterol should be limited to 300 mg a day

Recommended range for sodium is 2,000 to 5,000 mg per day

Fat of any kind should account for 30% or less of a day’s calorie intake

Disodium phosphate: Stabilizer

Modified food starch: Thickener

Monosodium glutamate: Flavor enhancer

Xanthan gum: Thickener

Cellulose gum: Thickener

Mono and diglycerides: Emulsifiers

Oleoresin paprika: Flavoring (extract of paprika)

Source: Food and Drug Administration, nutritionists