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Original URL: http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/dec03/194344.asp

Obesity changing food industry
No-carb ice cream in wings for public more concerned with health
By MARK JOHNSON and JOHN FAUBER
[email protected]
Posted: Dec. 20, 2003

At a university laboratory in Madison, in the heart of the Dairy State, a longtime professor is tinkering with one of dairy's sacred cows. As obesity reaches epidemic proportions in America, Bob Bradley is creating a no-carbohydrate ice cream stripped of its sugar.

Bradley's experimental ice cream will have plenty of fat and calories, but it won't have the lactose - the natural sugar in dairy products - or any of the added sugar. Instead, the ice cream will rely on a no-calorie substitute 600 times sweeter than sugar.

"The Atkins diet is going to love this one," says Bradley. He plans to make his first 50-pound batch of the ice cream next month.

Bradley's work underscores a development that has been all but lost in the uproar over America's soaring obesity rate.

Quietly, gradually, obesity is changing the way food is prepared, marketed and consumed. But the changes illuminate the schizophrenic response of nutritionists who have given us dueling mantras in the fight to slim down: "low fat" vs. "low carb."

At stake in this food revolution is both the nation's health and the well-being of some of its largest companies.

A September Merrill Lynch report calculated that a mere 1% shift in spending in "at-risk" food categories such as cookies, lunch meats and cheese would translate to almost $1.5 billion in potential revenue for companies, "a significant figure that could be up for grabs."

As America's Dairyland and one of the nation's more obese states, Wisconsin finds itself in the middle of both the obesity epidemic and the food industry's response to it.

Butter Buds, a Racine food technology company, has turned its culinary alchemy on three of this state's most revered products: butter, cheese and beer.

At the firm's plant, massive slabs of butter and cheese roll down a conveyor belt and into vats where enzymes break down the fats on their way to converting familiar foods into potent low-fat, low-calorie powders. A similar process turns liquid beer concentrate into a powder that is used as a flavoring.

With little fanfare, another lab creation, the no-calorie sweetener Splenda, has taken off. Just five years after gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the sweetener made by a Fort Washington, Pa., company appears in 3,000 products from soft drinks to syrup to applesauce.

Derived from cane sugar, Splenda is one of a new wave of sweeteners, fat replacers and other concoctions designed to satisfy taste with fewer calories or none at all.

Food firms gearing up
While nutritionists doubt the solution to obesity will be discovered in a test tube, the nation's food labs have cranked up the search for products that can be marketed as healthier choices.

In the last year, Frito-Lay introduced Lay's reduced-fat chips and eliminated trans fatty acids from millions of bags of Doritos, Tostitos and Cheetos. (Trans fatty acids have no more calories than other fats but have been linked to heart disease.)

This fall, Coca-Cola introduced Swerve, a canned skim milk, Splenda-sweetened product that comes in flavors such as vanilla-banana, blueberry and chocolate. The drink is focused on the profitable school vending market, where some districts now are banning soda sales.

In February, Kraft plans to introduce new, reformulated Lunchables for 12- to 14-year-olds that are almost 20% lower in fat and calories.

And the industry's response to obesity goes well beyond the laboratory to address the nature of fast food, portion sizes and how food is marketed, especially to children. In a wide-ranging announcement in July, Kraft pledged to eliminate all of its marketing in schools and to reduce the size of single-serving portions.

McDonald's, which became an unwilling symbol of the nation's dietary shortcomingseven before it was sued on behalf of overweight children, has been test-marketing a healthy Happy Meal for adults. The "Go Active! Happy Meal" includes a salad, bottled water, an exercise booklet and a pedometer used to measure the number of steps a person takes.

In March, the restaurant chain introduced a line of "premium salads," a move that J. Hugh McEvoy, president of the Chicago Nutrition Association, called "a sea change . . . This is like putting a man on the moon, to put salads in every McDonald's."

While McDonald's spokeswoman Lori Miller says the new products "have been in the pipeline for years," in response to consumer demands rather than publicity about obesity, the pace of change appears to have accelerated recently.

Congress, suits spur change
The change in food is being driven not only in food labs, restaurants and supermarket aisles, but also in Washington, where the 108th Congress has considered 42 bills that refer to obesity - a number not far short of the 50 bills that refer to Iraq. The bills set out to improve nutrition among the needy, solicit anti-obesity programs from school districts and require states to provide Medicaid coverage for prescription drugs used to treat obesity.

Last month Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced yet another obesity bill; this one would require restaurant chains and vending machines to include nutritional information on each printed menu and menu board.

Pressure has also come from the nation's courts, where some trial lawyers have been seeking to make "Big Food" the next tobacco. In a handful of high-profile cases, lawyers have sued food companies, accusing them of making customers fat, saddling them with obesity-related illnesses and misleading them with deceptive labels and advertising aimed at young children.

Other lawyers have criticized the so-called "fat suits," saying that the cases against fatty foods and cigarettes are vastly different.

"To suggest that hamburgers, french fries and junk food are a basis for lawsuits is stretching the law to the breaking point," says Robert Habush, former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America and the lawyer whose firm led Wisconsin's lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

"If children are getting obese, it's their parents' fault. If people want to stuff their faces, it's their fault."

Still, even some food industry supporters believe the lawsuits have spurred the rush of companies announcing new, healthier products.

"I think these are pre-emptive efforts driven primarily by the fear of legal action," says Robert A. Levy, a senior fellow at the non-profit Cato Institute. "(A company's) primary responsibility should be to give customers what they want, not to kowtow to these trial lawyers. I don't want my chief executive officer deciding what's in the best interests of the nation's health. To **** with a healthy nation. That's not a public issue; it's a private matter."

But changing food also may be in the best interest of companies, and even may be necessary for their survival, say some in the financial community.

JP Morgan analyst Arnaud Langlois called this year's World Health Organization report on obesity "a time bomb for the food industry."

"The food industry will have to review its marketing practices and transform itself, in our view, regardless of potential regulation or litigation," Langlois wrote in an April analysis.

In a similar report, the firm UBS Warburg wrote that obesity "is not an issue that is going to be ignored . . . The food and soft drink industry will, in our opinion, have to change the products they sell, the way they label them and the way they market them."

Is change for real?
Not everyone is convinced that such a change is truly under way.

"What the processed food industry wants is to get people to continue to eat processed food," said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food industry watchdog group. "They don't care if the foods cause obesity or not."

Such skepticism raises questions that are crucial to the American effort to slim down:

Are the food companies serious, or merely engaged in public relations?

And are we serious about eating healthier and even cutting back on some of the foods we love?

Already there is ample evidence that it won't be easy for food companies and the public to change their ways.

In September 2002, McDonald's announced plans to cut the trans fatty acids in its french fries in half by using a healthier cooking oil. But at the beginning of March, when the change was to have been in place, the company said it wasn't ready. Nine months later the switch to a healthier oil has yet to occur.

"It has taken longer than we've anticipated, but it's more important for us to get it right and ensure that this is a product our customers want," says Bill Whitman, a McDonald's spokesman.

Other food changes have been simpler and, to some nutritionists, unimpressive.

Hardee's, which incurred the wrath of nutritionists after introducing its Thickburger line of sandwiches, including one with 1,201 calories and 88 grams of fat, turned the tables last week by offering a "low-carb" Thickburger wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun. The new Thickburger also contains less ketchup.

"Taking the bun off doesn't make the Thickburger a diet food," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "It still is going to have a lot of calories and just as much fat to clog your arteries."

For its part, the food industry downplays the role that obesity litigation and bad publicity have played in the development of new food. Companies such as McDonald's argue that they have been responding primarily to the tastes of their customers.

But some, like Frito-Lay, say they've changed products because they're concerned about health issues. Frito-Lay spokesman Charles Nicolas says the move to eliminate trans fatty acids from Doritos, Tostitos and Cheetos began in 2001 after a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher published a study linking trans fats to health problems.

The company's entire technology group - more than 50 scientists - spent thousands of hours working to eliminate trans fatty acids and conducted almost 250 analytical tests. The result: The chips are now fried in a corn oil that's more scarce and expensive than the partially hydrogenated soybean oil used previously.

All told, the change from one oil to another cost Frito-Lay "in the tens of millions of dollars," Nicolas says.

It could be a wise investment, judging by recent trends. In the first three quarters of 2003, unit sales volume for Frito-Lay's so-called "better-for-you" products grew about 25%, far outpacing the single-digit growth for less healthy, euphemistically named, "fun-for-you products," according to the company's most recent quarterly report.

Sweet investment
A more dramatic payoff awaited one new food that took far longer to reach the marketplace. The no-calorie, sugar-substitute Splenda took two decades and involved the work of hundreds of scientists at labs in the U.S. and Great Britain.

Leslie A. Goldsmith, one of the scientists who worked on Splenda, put the cost of the project in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The gamble paid off with retail sales tripling in just two years to more than $105 million in 2003.

Splenda begins as cane sugar, but the sugar molecules are altered by removing three hydrogen-oxygen groups and replacing them with three chlorine atoms; its maker, McNeil Nutritionals, a Johnson & Johnson Co. subsidiary, has patented the process and has declined to describe it.

The resulting product, known by the scientific name sucralose, is 600 times sweeter than normal sugar and behaves differently. When it enters the body, normal sugar is broken down by enzymes, a process that generates energy in the form of calories.

But enzymes cannot break down sucralose. Instead, most sucralose passes through the digestive system unchanged, while a small amount is absorbed and excreted in the urine.

Scientists tested sucralose in animals, mostly rats and mice, for more than 20 years before finally gaining approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1998.

Splenda has since been joined by Neotame, a no-calorie sweetener made by NutraSweet Co. that is up to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar and was approved by the FDA last year. And more sugar substitutes are waiting in the wings, including alitame, also known as Aclame, which is 2,000 times sweeter than sugar. Alitame, made by Pfizer Inc., is in use in Mexico, New Zealand and China and is awaiting approval in the U.S.

The food industry also has been developing a line of pseudo fats.

Salatrim, also known as Benefat, is a blend of fatty acids that has 5 calories per gram, compared with traditional fat's 9 calories per gram. Salatrim, made by Danisco, a food flavor company based in New Century, Kan., has been used in baked goods, confectionery and chocolate coatings.

Some experts worry that even if such products give consumers the taste they crave in a healthier form, they may only be feeding a fantasy.

"If you create it in the lab, it's probably less healthy than the foods we evolved to consume," says McEvoy, of the Chicago Nutrition Association, adding that products such as Splenda only encourage overconsumption of sweets.

"Splenda is a gateway drug to Snackwell's, which leads you to Ben & Jerry's. It's an enabler."

Needless to say, Splenda's maker denies that the sugar substitute encourages people to gorge on sweets.

Efforts to change our food and reduce obesity are further complicated by another fundamental problem: Scientists still haven't decided on the healthiest approach to dieting.

Last month, Tufts University announced that the first "head-to-head" study of four popular diet programs - the Zone, Weight Watchers, Atkins and Ornish plans - yielded no clear-cut winner. All four produced modest weight loss and improved measures of heart health such as cholesterol and insulin levels.

Should science reach a verdict in the debate between low fat and low carb, the new wave of food could shift dramatically. Some companies aren't waiting, marketing products from beer to bread as low-carb. The new craze has contributed to the highest egg and beef prices in years, according to Tom Kruchten, a statistician with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Dairy dives in
Low-fat or low-carb, the dairy industry is poised to profit.

Already, low-carbohydrate ice cream has been appearing on grocery shelves, though none goes as far as the UW no-carbohydrate ice cream.

Using a grant from Dairy Management Inc., Bradley says he plans to mix his first 50-pound batch of no-carb vanilla next month at UW's Food Science building. Despite the lack of carbohydrates, the ice cream will be as rich in fat as any premium ice cream on the market, he said.

"It will be strikingly similar to the composition of Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's for fat," he says.

Taste testing on campus likely will determine the fate of the ice cream, he says.

Butter Buds takes the low-fat, low-calorie approach.

Food scientists start with slabs of butter or cheese and use enzymes to release the 21 fatty acids that provide the buttery and cheesy tastes. The resulting powders are so potent that only a small amount provides the same flavor as real butter or cheese.

"We can make something that is low-fat taste as good as high-fat," says company founder Allen Buhler.

When Buhler began work on these products more than two decades ago, he admits, "I thought it was blasphemy fooling around with butter."

When healthy meets reality
Inevitably, the new low-fat and low-carb products will force us to confront our own nature and physiology, the barriers of mind and body that so often defeat weight loss.

In the past, food companies have misjudged the public appetite for nutritionally conscious products, generating such notable flops as Taco Bell's Border Lite menu, Kellogg's low-fat Pop-Tarts, Kraft's reduced-fat Chips Ahoy and, most infamous, McDonald's McLean burger.

In consumer research, "what you hear is, 'Yes, I'm concerned about my health.' What happens, though, in terms of behavior, is quite different," says Kevin Ladwig, a spokesman for Johnsonville, the Sheboygan-based maker of sausage and bratwurst.

Although Johnsonville introduced a line of lower-fat foods in the 1990s, Ladwig says, "consumers did not vote for them." The lower-fat line survived just two or three years. Company scientists continue to search for the holy grail of a lower-fat sausage that meets the consumer demand for taste.

Today it is far from clear whether the public will embrace the next generation of lower-fat brats and McLean burgers.

In a recent report on obesity, Merrill Lynch described the food market as "bipolar," divided between our urges to diet and to indulge.

After declining almost 5% for two consecutive years, sales of what the industry labels "light, lean, low and less-of brands" rebounded. They rose 3% in 2001, then jumped more than 6.5% in 2002.

Sales of "better-for-you foods and drinks," including soy products and water beverages, have grown even faster - averaging 18% per year over the last five years, according to Times and Trends, an industry publication.

And yet, as the Merrill Lynch report noted, Americans ate 2.7% more pounds of confectionery in 2002 than in the previous year, and 5.9% more pounds of chocolate confectionery.

The lure of fat and sweets remains deeply embedded in our brains and in our history.

Early evidence of our attraction to sweet foods can be found in cave paintings, between 10,000 and 20,000 years old, showing our Paleolithic ancestors risking their lives to raid beehives.

As for fat, scientists believe that faced with lean times, early humans evolved a brain circuitry that rewarded consumption of high-calorie foods with a feeling of pleasure. Humans also developed a mechanism that responds to weight loss by releasing hormones and other substances that slow down metabolism and fuel a desire to eat more.

With this in mind, scientists wonder if the body will respond to lower-fat foods by resetting this finely tuned mechanism, causing us to eat more and thwart the effort to lose weight.

Also, will artificial sweeteners and fat-replacers produce the same effect in the brain as the real thing? asks Ann Kelley, a UW neuroscientist.

"If you have a piece of cake that's completely artificial, that could work," she says. "I do think science is helping improve foods, but we just don't know yet."