We Are What We Eat

- We Are What We Eat
- 1. What's in your recipe?
  - 1.1. Celeb diets
  - 1.2 Let's do lunch
  - 1.3 The wedding banquet
- 2. Only skin-deep
- 3. Superfood
  - 3.1 Counting your chickens
- 4. Food, culture and society
  - 4.1. Food around the world
  - 4.2. Everyone's a critic
- Bite size
- Aviso Legal

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# 3. Superfood

## Focus on

Do you know what miracle foods are?

Do you usually consume any of these products?

## Do it yourself

### Question

The truth about ‘miracle foods’ – from chia seeds to coconut oil

### Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, dandruff… can these things really be cured, or at least prevented, by what we eat?

As books that give answers go, there’s one classic that often gets overlooked – the dictionary. So next time you’re wondering whether a £10 tub of the latest miracle food can really stop cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and get rid of fat in time for summer, look up the word “miracle” where you will find this definition: “an extraordinary and wondrous event that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws”.

“Whether it’s coconut oil, chia seeds or apple cider vinegar,” says Duane Mellor, an assistant professor in dietetics at the University of Nottingham and a spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, “there is no scientific evidence to suggest that if you top up your diet with any ‘miracle’ or special food that you’ll get any of the promised effects. The idea is almost entirely a marketing vehicle, but when people read claims online, they start to think differently and can start believing it.” One of the reasons people might believe the hype is because as with any good miracle – or magic trick – the success lies in smoke and mirrors. With miracle foods, while the magical health food salesman is conjuring a few extra coins out of our pockets, we’re left bamboozled by scientific terminology.

“Many products tend to use all sorts of horrendous scientific jargon, like ‘maintains cognitive function’,” says Mellor, “which are watery, scientific-style claims that people read as being something meaningful to human health. Then there are antioxidants and free radicals, which are some of the most feared and misunderstood words used. ”Free radicals are unstable elements that come spinning off any oxygen-using chemical reaction in the body. They are unstable because they are missing an electron and, in a bid to restabilise themselves, they steal an electron from elsewhere, whether from the fats in cell membranes or from your DNA. The damage they do in this process is called oxidative stress, and can be associated with heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Free radicals, however, are also involved in beneficial processes. They help to destroy invading bacteria and play a part in cell communication. To limit their role to only those things that benefit us, our bodies make things called antioxidants that provide free radicals with the electrons they need so they don’t cause damage elsewhere.

“But if you look at the antioxidants circulating in our bodies,” says Mellor, “by far the most common are the ones we make ourselves. Many of the antioxidants in things like chia seeds are there to stop the plant oils going rancid, or to protect them from sunlight damage, and may not be that available to our bodies anyway. So although the EFSA [European Food Safety Authority] allows manufacturers to claim that their products are rich in antioxidants, they can’t claim any health benefits. If you look carefully, it’s sort of legalese.”

Part of this confusion is because diet is complex. Often the nutrients in many foods become available to us only when eaten as part of a wider diet: only when we cook carrots can their beta-carotene become more available and the lycopene in tomatoes is most readily available when they are eaten with oil.

According to Ali Khavandi, a cardiologist, the claims that foods can help you lose weight or improve immunity are vague for a reason – they are based on experiments carried out on animals or on human cells in a lab. They have not been shown to have any effect on people, and until such effectiveness is shown, he says, we should stay open-minded but cautious about exaggerated claims.

“As doctors, I think for the past few years, we’ve been more interested in the sexier side of preventing disease – new drugs and operation techniques – and we’ve left the diet arena a little abandoned. It’s now been populated by unqualified people and celebrity health gurus spreading misinformation. As doctors, I think we have an obligation to reassert an authoritative voice when it comes to healthy eating.”

Getting the spotlight back from celebrities and fad food products might be a difficult task. “The problem,” says Khavandi, “is that the message we try to get across is not very interesting to people. They have heard it all before.” With daily sensationalised articles about the benefits or dangers of specific foods, people get confused and lose sight of the simple messages, a complication nowhere truer than with cancer.

“There is certainly no such thing as an anti-cancer diet,” says Justin Stebbing, a consultant oncologist at Imperial College London. “But patients ask me about these foods all the time.” He explains why: “As a patient, disease makes you lose control. People immediately want to regain that control and a very easy way for them to do that is by diet, and they can get all sorts of things off the internet. We should understand that the internet is a double-edged sword and if we’re looking for information we should go to reputable sites, like Cancer Research UK”

“Remember: if you see a claim on a blog, and if it’s persuasive and looks good, ask yourself why has the company not used it in their marketing? If the product really did prevent cancer or heart disease, do you not think it’d be plastered all over the packaging?”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/15/truth-about-miracle-foods-chia-seeds-coconut-oil

1.The article makes reference to the dictionary

#### Answers

Option 1

a. to show miraculous claims may be based on fact.

Option 2

b. to show how the word miracle is not used appropriately.

Option 3

c. to show that it is overused when making claims about wonder foods.

#### Feedback

Wrong

Correct Option

Wrong

#### Solution

1. Wrong (Feedback)
2. Correct Option (Feedback)
3. Wrong (Feedback)

### Question

2. According to Duane Mellor,

#### Answers

Option 1

a. people are no longer easily fooled by such marketing jargon.

Option 2

b. the marketing claims of the food companies tend to minimise the product’s effects.

Option 3

c. online claims are often credible because people don’t fully understand what they read.

#### Feedback

Wrong

Wrong

Correct Option

#### Solution

1. Wrong (Feedback)
2. Wrong (Feedback)
3. Correct Option (Feedback)

### Question

3. Free radicals

#### Answers

Option 1

a. are highly destructive to the body’s natural processes.

Option 2

b. are a by-product of our own body’s natural processes.

Option 3

c. communicate between bacteria and diseased cells.

#### Feedback

Wrong

Correct Option

Wrong

#### Solution

1. Wrong (Feedback)
2. Correct Option (Feedback)
3. Wrong (Feedback)

### Question

4. Adding antioxidants to food

#### Answers

Option 1

a. may have no benefit to our health whatsoever.

Option 2

b. may often be for reasons of preservation of the integrity of the product.

Option 3

c. both of the above.

#### Feedback

Wrong

Wrong

Correct Option

#### Solution

1. Wrong (Feedback)
2. Wrong (Feedback)
3. Correct Option (Feedback)

### Question

5. Claims about the effects of wonder foods

#### Answers

Option 1

a. tend to be more effective for pyschological reasons.

Option 2

b. have been conscientiously disproved by doctors again and again over the years.

Option 3

c. are strictly limited by the EFSA.

#### Feedback

Correct Option

Wrong

Wrong

#### Solution

1. Correct Option (Feedback)
2. Wrong (Feedback)
3. Wrong (Feedback)

### Question

6. When considering the benefits of a health food, according to Dr Stebbing,

#### Answers

Option 1

a. you can find a lot of useful supplementary information online.

Option 2

b. your oncologist can advise you about what types of food to avoid.

Option 3

c. there is often a big difference between online claims and what is on the packaging.

#### Feedback

Wrong

Wrong

Correct Option

#### Solution

1. Wrong (Feedback)
2. Wrong (Feedback)
3. Correct Option (Feedback)

## Reading Activity

### The Great Famine

The Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease, and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. It is sometimes referred to, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine, because about two-fifths of the population was solely reliant on this cheap crop for a number of historical reasons. During the famine, approximately one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%.

The proximate cause of famine was potato blight, which ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s. However, the impact in Ireland was disproportionate, as one third of the population was dependent on the potato for a range of ethnic, religious, political, social, and economic reasons, such as land acquisition, absentee landlords, and the Corn Laws, which all contributed to the disaster to varying degrees and remain the subject of intense historical debate.

The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memorymand became a rallying point for Irish nationalist movements. The already strained relations between many Irish and the British Crown soured further, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions, and boosting Irish nationalism and republicanism in Ireland and among Irish emigrants in the United States and elsewhere.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License 3.0

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