A Taste of Success for Finnish Firms

If you fight fire with fire, maybe it makes sense to fight fat with fat.

That seems to be the strategy behind the recent “functional food” breakthroughs by Finnish scientists, who are infusing the active ingredient of the world’s first cholesterol-lowering margarine into the fats and oils of other products to create healthier sausages, cheese spreads, snack bars and chocolate.

Here, as elsewhere in the cholesterol-conscious world, health-care professionals still recommend eating less fat to reduce the risk of heart disease, the No. 1 killer of adults in the developed world.

But in recognition of the frequent lack of willpower among humans, Finnish researchers are trying to make it safer for those who sin. By adding plant derivatives known as sterols, which impede absorption of cholesterol in the body, fatty foods can be rendered less harmful while preserving their taste.

As many as one in three Finns has higher cholesterol than doctors consider tolerable, for the most part because of a diet traditionally heavy in meat and milk fats. But since an eyebrow-raising U.S. study in the late 1950s that identified Finland as having the highest average cholesterol levels of seven countries reviewed, Finns have been far more concerned about the associated health risks than their European neighbors.

Heavy investments by both government and private firms to create functional foods--those containing additives or natural substances that lower the risk of heart disease--have resulted in major consumer successes such as the Benecol products made here and have opened promising new global markets for guilt-free foods.

“Finland has become the Silicon Valley of functional foods,” says Mervi Sibakov, executive director of the Tekes national technology agency, an arm of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. “We believe in them, and that’s why we are putting so much money into their development.”

The national government’s budget includes about $430 million a year for research by the food industry--a sizable sum for a country of only 5.3 million people. More than 10% of that funding goes toward development of functional foods.

In this southwestern town long focused on flour-milling and making chemicals for paper production, the Raisio Group introduced Benecol only four years ago. The product is a margarine containing a patented compound called stanol ester. The compound mates sterol, a wood pulp-processing byproduct, with a fatty acid from rapeseed oil.

More than a dozen medical studies show that those who ingest stanol ester in moderate amounts--equal to about 2 1/2 pats of margarine--reduce by an average of 14% their level of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, the artery-clogging form of cholesterol.

“Some consumers find it easier to use products to reduce cholesterol, rather than take medication,” says Ritva Ojala, food industry analyst for Conventum Securities in Helsinki, the Finnish capital. “Products like Benecol also allow you to do what you want, rather than what you should do, and people like that.”

Benecol’s producers bridle at suggestions that they are encouraging consumers to indulge their fat cravings.

“There is no drug or substance in existence that allows you to live and eat any way you want without consequences,” says Raisio Group’s vice president for Benecol products, Jukka Kaitaranta. “This isn’t a miracle product or something that gives you extra rights.”

The margarines, salad dressings, cream cheese spreads and candy bars marketed in the United States and Europe under the Benecol label are intended as substitutes for foods that consumers are unwilling to cut out of their diets, he says.

That philosophy of softening the blows for those who tumble from dietary virtue is obviously a winning strategy. Merrill Lynch estimated that Benecol took 2.4% of the U.S. margarine market within the first four weeks of its roll-out in May, and Raisio Group now has half a dozen competitors for products offering sterol-infused fats to reduce cholesterol levels.

University of Helsinki biomedicine researcher Heikki Karppanen has taken the idea of lowering cholesterol a step further by infusing foods with elevated levels of calcium, magnesium and potassium to alter sodium content and provide “multiple benefits” with his MultiBene food additive. He also was the innovator of a sterol-altered salt marketed in the United States for cardiac patients.

The Teriaka branch of Finland’s Paulig Group, which has marketed herbs, spices and coffees for 120 years, has patented its own plant sterols and infused them in vegetable oils, milk fat and cocoa butter.

Sausages containing sterols are on the market from the central Finnish company Huittisten Liitapojat, allowing Finns to indulge in another traditional staple otherwise on the dietitians’ hit lists.

Raisio Group’s stiffest competitor is the Dutch-British Unilever company, which has won European Union approval of its cholesterol-lowering Flora margarine, marketed in the United States under the brand name Take Control.

Finnish dietary and medical institutions also are among the world leaders in developing other functional foods, such as baked goods made from oat and rye flours that have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease. Research also is underway to extract the health-promoting substances from eggs--the ovomucin proteins that fight viruses and tumors--for use in other products. Nutritionists also are manipulating gastrointestinal flora to fight harmful bacteria like E. coli.

Sibakov, the Tekes director and a microbiologist by training, echoes fellow health professionals in insisting that most consumers in the developed world know very well what is good for them but often fail to maintain the low-fat diet they know they should.

“It isn’t so tasty. Who wants to eat raw carrots all the time?” asks Sibakov. “All the aroma of food is contained in the fat, and we have to consider the human being who is attracted by that.”

Oliver Palmgren, a heavyset printer shopping at the Valintatalo supermarket in northern Helsinki, exudes the conflicted consumer habits of most perpetual dieters.

“I use it even though it doesn’t taste as good as butter,” Palmgren says of the Benecol margarine tub he has plucked from the refrigerator case. “It’s better than going without, and it does reduce my cholesterol.”

Many Finns have changed their eating habits since the 1960s, when cholesterol research--primarily in the United States--linked high death rates in Finland to the country’s high-fat diet, says Antti Ahlstroem, a professor of nutrition at the University of Helsinki.

But cholesterol consciousness and dietary restraint apparently are not synonymous, as national statistics show that Finns are getting fatter year to year.

“Our message to consumers is to be critical,” says Riitta Tainio, a food analyst for the Finnish Consumers’ Assn. “If you don’t have a cholesterol problem, why buy such expensive margarine and sausage?”

She insists that fellow Finns know very well what they should and shouldn’t be eating, but that modern lifestyles force even the most committed dieters to delegate their meal preparation to restaurants and prepared-food producers, making it difficult to rigorously control caloric and fat intake.

Because there’s nothing particularly Finnish about the good intentions-bad behavior trap, those marketing functional foods believe that they’ve tapped into a gold mine.

Benecol, the only cholesterol-lowering product on the market long enough for consumer studies to track its sales dynamics, is used regularly by about 4% of Finns, according to a study conducted by the consumers’ association two years ago.

Others note that the prospects for explosive growth are obviously in the international market, especially in more populous health-conscious countries like the United States, Britain and Japan, where significant parts of the population have high cholesterol.

“There are 98 million Americans who are cholesterol-concerned,” notes Ronald Schmid, a vice president of McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the division of Johnson & Johnson that bought the global marketing rights for Benecol. The company’s two Benecol margarines--one that is 70% fat and is suitable for use in cooking, the other a light version for spreading that is 40% fat--went on sale in the United States in May, and four kinds of salad dressings and three snack bars have since followed.

“We’re developing a whole line of products to make it easy for Americans to use Benecol in a variety of ways,” says Schmid, who declines to be specific about what new applications might be on store shelves in the near future.

While the idea of making fat less hazardous to health is appealing to many consumers, some purists regard the breakthroughs as artificial, even offensive.

“I don’t want to live in a world where the border between nutrition and medication is so obscured,” complains Ahlstroem, the nutrition professor. “We’ve already lost so much of the joy of eating with the destruction of seasonality. I like strawberries and crayfish for Christmas as much as the next person, but they were more enjoyable when you could only get them in season. What does it mean to have beneficial fat?”