Weighing Weight-Management Options
By John Spizzirri
Contributing Editor
Despite what may appear as confusion, it seems people are eating it up. A 2004 survey conducted by the Calorie Control Council, Atlanta, shows that the United States reached the highest level of dieting in the past 15 years, with some 33% of people in the survey saying they are on a diet. According to the survey, this is 35% higher than a similar survey conducted in 2000.
And perhaps, just in time or about time. We are an obese nation. Two-thirds of adults and one-third of our children are overweight, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association statistics.
Any one of the more-successful national fad diets — Atkins, South Beach, Mediterranean — might have contributed to the growing interest in reducing weight. But, in general, says Beth Hubrich, executive director, the Calorie Control Council, people might just be more aware that there is a problem, and they are trying to find ways to be healthier. “At least from the low-calorie, low-fat food and beverage industry, I think most professionals will agree that what it boils down to is that calories count,” she says. “You have to have energy balance between what you’re taking in and what you’re expending through exercise. So, when you have the reduced-fat and low-calorie products, your body will respond to that message. If you’re using low-calorie sweeteners or perhaps a light product, like a light lemonade or a diet soft soda, you’re definitely cutting calories.” So, it is to the consumer’s advantage — and let’s be honest, it doesn’t hurt the manufacturers marketing these products — to take a little time to peruse the various and multitudinous meals, snacks and beverages that offer some assistance in the constant struggle to maintain or reduce weight.
“Weight management is important for leading a healthy life, but there is a difference between dieting to lose weight and eating the right foods to reach and maintain an optimal weight,” says Regina DeMars, spokeswoman, ConAgra Foods, Inc., Omaha, NE. “Fad diets like Atkins and South Beach are often short lived. At Healthy Choice, we believe the term ‘daily diet’ should be transformed to ‘daily living.’ Many diets are also compromising and limiting, which often ends up only encouraging consumers to further indulge in poor eating habits.” According to DeMars, the company pioneered the category in 1988, when it launched the line to meet the growing consumer demand for higher standards for taste, convenience and nutrition in the healthy-meals category. Since introducing its first line of products almost two decades ago — consisting of 10 frozen meals — the line now offers more than 200 products and an extensive selection of varieties, including 70 different menu choices in meals alone. To meet consumers’ increasingly pressing need for convenience, the company has introduced lunch meats in resealable containers and microwaveable soup bowls.
Yet, despite the growing popularity of the healthy-meals category, there are those who continue to contrive arguments against it — they don’t have the same texture, they don’t taste as good and there are reports of long-term carcinogenic effects. Some of these arguments can be seen as legitimate, because they are based on individual perception, while others are based on misinformation.
The real question, say some experts, is what is that extra 20 or 30 lbs. doing to our health? Unlike perceptions, the risks associated with that extra weight include diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and certain forms of cancer.
Going no- and low-calorie
Weight Watchers International, Inc., Woodbury, NY, has been pitching its brand of weight-management products for the last 40-some years, initially, with little competition. Today, the company competes with a host of others capitalizing on the growing demand for weight-management products. Grocery-store shelves are now saturated with these products, perhaps forcing the company to increase its product awareness by seeking marketing support from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, queen of talk TV, and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.
Low-calorie products, particularly soft drinks, do exceptionally well in this market. Diet sodas rank high on the list as do noncarbonated beverages like light lemonade and flavored water. Yogurts have always been a big category, and sugar-free gums are making headway.
And with this growing variety, the market for artificial tabletop sweeteners like Splenda, Sweet’N Low and Equal have increased dramatically. Statistics compiled by Packaged Facts, New York, as of fall 2003, note that the market for sweeteners was estimated at $2 billion and could double by 2008 as new sweeteners and the products that contain them are added to the market.
Productscan Online, Naples, NY, reported that 2,225 sugarless or sugar-reduced products were introduced into the U.S. market in 2003, more than double that of four years ago. It also reports that these products represented 11% of all new products introduced in 2004.
Sweet choices
Many of these low-calorie products are driven mainly by the four artificial sweeteners approved for use in foods by FDA — saccharin, acesulfame K, aspartame and sucralose. The key to their success in the market is their ability to mimic the sweetness of sugar and provide health benefits that sugar does not.
For example, saccharin and acesulfame K contain no calories and are eliminated from the body without any change. Sucralose works in much the same way, though a very small amount is metabolized. And while aspartame is metabolized in the body, it acts like a protein.
These various low-calorie sweeteners contribute minimal or no calories. According to the FDA in Title 21, Section 101 of the Code of Federal Regulations (21CFR101.60(b)), reduced- or low-calorie products must have at least 25% fewer calories per reference amount than an appropriate reference food.
One of the trends today in food processing is to use a blend of sugar or dextrose, mostly sugar, with a low-calorie sweetener to replace sugar. These products use only half of the normal amount of sugar they typically would contain. Blended with a sweetener, 4 grams of this ingredient is equivalent in sweetness to 8 grams of sugar.
Polyols, or sugar alcohols, work well as sugar replacers and are often used in different blends for baking purposes. Hydrogenated maltose produces a polyol called maltitol that is about 90% as sweet as sugar and is noncariogenic. Diabetics can safely consume products containing maltitol, because, unlike sugar, it does not quickly raise glucose blood-sugar levels.
In terms of food processing, one of polyols’ advantages is they act as bulking agents in sugar-free products, particularly baked goods. “For example, if you were making a sugar-free cake, you would replace all of the sugar with an intense sweetener. But because the sweetener is so intense, you are adding only a very small amount,” explains Abe Bakal, Ph.D., president, ABIC International Consultants, Inc., Fairfield, NJ. “That amount is not enough to give you the bulk you need to make the cake, to give it the right texture or volume. The cake becomes flat, it has no volume, it doesn’t rise. Or, if you make a cookie, it will end up like a hockey puck. So, you have to add something that adds the bulk, and these are the sugar alcohols like isomalt, lactitol, maltitol and sorbitol.”
This same combination of low-fat sweeteners and polyols is found in candies and gums. Last January, parent company Cadbury Adams, Parsippany, NJ, introduced the Trident fusion line of gums that promotes the use of xylitol, also a polyol, on its packaging. In addition to its role as a sugar replacer, xylitol helps prevent tooth decay by reducing plaque build-up. This sweetener provides one-third fewer calories than sugar, about 2.4 calories per gram.
“Polyols can carry a ‘Does not promote tooth decay’ health claim, and they really help in oral health,” says Hubrich. “There’s been some research recently that shows that oral health is really important, not just from how your teeth look, but from the standpoint that the plaque that you have in your teeth may be an indicator of the plaque that you have in your arteries.”
Product designers often blend polyols and sweeteners, which allows food scientists to develop just the right sweetness and taste note they desire in a given product. Typically, no sweetener alone will deliver the same taste as sucrose.
For example, the taste of saccharin, an ingredient that has been around for some 120 years, does not appeal to some people. The introduction of aspartame and other low-calorie sweeteners allowed consumers to try various tabletop brands until they found the one that suited their palate. And, too, the introduction of new sweeteners provides the food technologist the opportunity to blend.
“You can imagine sweeteners being like flavors,” says Bakal. “If you want to make a flavor that is very close to the flavor of strawberry, you may end up blending three or four different strawberry flavors together to get the flavor note that you like. You can do the same thing with the sweeteners. You can blend saccharin with sucralose, sucralose with aspartame, etc., so that one blend gives you this note and another blend a different note. So, you end up with a product that more closely resembles sugar than if you would have used either one of the sweeteners separately.”
Fixing fat content
Fat-reduced and fat-free products and ingredients have long been the staple of health-related packaged foods. These ingredients continue to represent the primary keys to reducing and maintaining weight.
The Calorie Control Council’s 2004 survey found that 88% of American adults consumed low-fat, reduced-fat or fat-free products on a semi-regular basis — about once every two weeks — and 87% “are interested in being offered additional reduced-fat products.” But reduced-fat and fat-free products don’t always jibe with the consumer’s first commandment in product selection: flavor. Newer fat replacers have been, and are being, developed to replace dietary fat and the functions it serves in food-product development, namely flavor and texture, accompanied by a reduction in calories.
According to the Washington, D.C.– based International Food Information Council’s “Background on Dietary Fats & Fat Replacers,” fat replacers generally fall into three categories: those based on carbohydrate, protein or fat. “The ingredients that are used to replace fat depend on how the food product will be eaten or prepared. For example, not all fat replacer ingredients are heat stable. As such, the type of fat replacer used in a fat-free salad dressing may not work well for a muffin mix,” notes the document (see www.ific.org/nutrition/fats/index.cfm).
The actual calorie reduction depends on the fat replacer: those based on carbohydrates and proteins have 4 calories per gram, but many provide significantly fewer calories in use, often only one calorie per gram, since they are mixed with water. Fiber-based products, like cellulose, contain zero calories per gram. Those made of microparticulated protein provide 1 to 2 calories per gram. Certain fat-based fat replacers — such as olestra and Salatrim® — are absorbed incompletely or not at all by the body and so supply few or no calories.
A growing number of products can replace dietary fat, to a certain extent, while maintaining the integrity of the products to which they are applied. Olestra, perhaps one of the more recognized of the fat replacers, is a caloriefree fat derivative. Its heat stability has led to current applications, including a variety of snack chips and, more recently, FDA approved the use of olestra in microwave popcorn.
Another type of fat-based product to recently hit the U.S. market is Enova™ oil, which is reported to help maintain a healthy weight and a healthy lifestyle when used as part of a sensible diet. Its makers, ADM Kao LLC, Decatur, IL, point to clinical studies that suggest that less oil is stored in the body as fat when Enova is substituted for other fats in the diet.
“The science behind Enova oil is, we not only have differences in post-prandial-fat metabolism relative to body-fat storage, but then, at the end of the day, less of it is stored as body fat,” say Brent Flickinger, senior research manager, nutritional science, ADM Research. “The difference has to do with the structure of the oil. Enova oil is a diglyceride-rich oil, and the primary diglyceride is the 1,3 which is missing that middle fatty acid. After digestion absorption, which would be the same for a conventional oil or Enova oil, how your body puts back together those digestion products from the 1,3 diglycerides — in Enova — is less efficient. And, because of that, a different metabolic pathway has to be utilized by the body. As a result, there is less fat going into the postprandial — chylomicron — system.”
Enova’s versatility lends itself to sautéing, stir-frying and pan-frying. It is also GRAS for use in a number of food-product categories, including baked goods, margarine-type spreads, and meal-replacement beverages and bars.
“It’s excellent for salad dressings,” says Paul Tutt, director, Enova brand, ADM Kao. “That’s because it’s a neutral- flavored oil, so you don’t have an oil masking the flavor of another ingredient. You get a very light, clean taste from it.”
Due to Enova’s structure, very few processing modifications are required, though Flickinger suggests that the oil might act more like an emulsifier than a high-triglyceride oil. Also, the oil doesn’t change the flavor or texture of the products to which it is applied. “For example, if there have been any differences, cakes tend to be moister and fluffier,” he adds.
ADM is currently working with a number of manufacturers which have either put this oil into their product-development pipeline or have been conducting consumer research with it. One company, Flatout, Saline, MI, recently announced it will use the oil in its flatbread.
New lipid-based products are also on the rise in the food industry that take approaches other than calorie control to weight management. Lipid Nutrition, a division of Loders Croklaan, Wormerveer, the Netherlands, develops designer lipids in highly concentrated and purified forms. New ingredients like Clarinol CLA help food-product designers formulate products that have body-composition benefits.
The patented CLA blend has been shown “in numerous clinical trials in overweight human volunteers to have beneficial effects on body composition,” says Patrick Luchsinger, marketing manager, Lipid Nutrition, Channahon, IL. “Clarinol can effectively aid in increasing lean muscle and reduces body fat by preventing fat accumulation in fat cells. It has also been shown to reduce body fat specifically in the abdominal region. Epidemiological studies show that a reduction in abdominal fat has positive implications for cardiovascular health and lowers the risk of coronary events.”
Technologies developed by the company help it produce free-flowing powdered lipids that have longer shelf life and resist oxidation, in storage as well as in finished products. The glyceride oil and powder forms of Clarinol CLA can also replace fat in traditional transfat foods without altering the formulation, though it is not yet approved by FDA to do so. Currently, the CLA ingredient is considered self-affirmed GRAS and the company is waiting for FDA full GRAS approval, which expands opportunities, especially for trans fatty-acid replacement.
Clarinol has a “clean” taste that will not affect the flavor profile of a product. And these nutritional lipids can be used in a large array of food applications, such as nutrition bars, savory snacks, baked goods, beverages and dairy products. They also can be used at a wide range of doses, depending on formulation and macronutrient profile desires.
The company suggests that its newest ingredient, PinnoThin, targets weight loss by reducing the desire to eat, thus lowering caloric intake. The active ingredient, pinolenic acid, which is extracted from the seeds of the Korean pine nut, helps stimulate the release of the hunger-suppressing hormone CCK (cholecystokinin). The company believes CKK helps the body digest fats better and sends a “full” feeling to the brain.
Supplement crossovers
Supplements taken in food form, such as fortified bars, beverages, teas and chews, can often supplant nonfood sources as the number of GRAS ingredients from this category increases.
In recent years, FDA has banned the use of specific products like ephedra, which promote themselves as weight-loss supplements without evidence to back-up their claims — and sometimes proved dangerous. The agency has also warned other online distributors of dietary supplements to cease unfounded claims in their ads.
Still, the supplements keep on coming, though this new breed has some scientific merit and are typically derived from more-natural, nutrient-oriented sources. One of these, the South African plant Hoodia gordonii, is touted by Stella Labs, Paramus, NJ, as “the leading-weight-loss ingredient on the market today” and “an up-and-coming product in 2006.”
A product description brochure produced by the company notes that early clinical trials found a molecule within the plant that mimics the effect of glucose, but with greater intensity, thus suppressing the desire to eat. It also notes that the plant is both useful as a supplement and in functional foods.
Chromium is another mineral that is making a splash on the nutritional ingredients front. Found in eggs and grains, chromium has been shown to reduce weight in a number of studies.
For example, chromium picolinate supplementation has led to increased lean body mass in obese individuals. According to a June 1998 article in Current Therapeutic Research, clinically obese patients who received 400 mcg per day of chromium picolinate for three months lost significantly more body weight and fat than did the placebo group. In 2002, chromium picolinate was affirmed GRAS for use in nutritional bars and beverages.
InterHealth Nutraceuticals, Benicia, CA, manufactures a supplement called ChromeMate. Unlike other brands, this chromium-picolinate product utilizes a niacin-bound chromium called chromium nicotinate or polynicotinate.
According to the company, chromium helps insulin metabolize fat and dramatically increases the amount of blood sugar available for use in energy production. It also suggests that the specific configuration of niacinbound chromium “is the safest and most-potent form of chromium available as a dietary supplement,” though a disclaimer notes that this statement was not evaluated by FDA.
But the company’s research proved that its product was not only safe, but acted positively upon the protein and metabolic functions associated with the burning and reduction of fat. “We took obese, diabetic mice and treated them with ChromeMate for 10 weeks and proved that LDL, HDL and triglyceride levels were changing toward the healthy level,” says Debasis Bagchi, senior vice president of research and development, InterHealth Nutraceuticals. “Then we looked at subcutaneous tissues — which include subcutaneous abdominal fat.” Their research showed that, he continues, in those tissues, the supplement gave the signal that promotes more muscle. Upon receiving GRAS certification for the supplement, the company began marketing the products for use in a variety of food and beverage applications.
In terms of formulation, Bagchi notes the company has created combinations of its products that, while not totally water soluble, can be used in solid applications, such as energy bars. Current applications for the ingredients include cookies and beverages like power drinks.
Regulations and rumors
Like dietary supplements, the success of low-calorie and reduced-calorie sweeteners, as well as fat replacers, has not come without some challenges. Saccharin, for example, the oldest and the best-known of the FDA-approved sweeteners, was challenged by a study in which rats were given high concentrations of sodium saccharin. The researchers reported increased incidents of bladder tumors among the test subjects. However, later research found that the amount of saccharin given to the rats was extremely excessive and that the mechanism by which the rats developed these tumors had no relevance to humans. Based on this new evidence, the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, issued a report giving saccharin a clean bill of health in 2000.
Another victim of controversial research was the low-calorie sweetener cyclamate, which was banned for use in the United States in 1970, although it is still used in other parts of the world. During the mid-1980s, both FDA’s Cancer Assessment Committee and the National Academy of Sciences agreed that cyclamate did not prove carcinogenic. A petition to re-approve the sweetener is currently before FDA.
Since aspartame’s approval, some consumers have reported symptoms they believed were associated with its consumption. FDA has investigated these, concluding that there is no “reasonable evidence of possible public health harm” and “no consistent or unique patterns of symptoms reported with respect to aspartame that can be causally linked to its use.” Other allegations that aspartame causes a number of health problems, including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and lupus, have continued to pop up on the Internet and in various nonscientific media without documented scientific evidence. Recently, several governments and expert scientific committees (including the Scientific Committee on Food of the European Commission, the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency, the French Food Safety Agency and Health Canada) evaluated these claims and found they were false.
Other sweeteners have their share of health rumors: Some detractors have expressed concern with sucralose’s chlorine and its effect on the thymus gland; others feel the carcinogenicity of acesulfame K might not be properly understood due to insufficient studies.
“Unfortunately, there has been a lot of misinformation floating around out there on the Internet and in e-mails about low-calorie sweeteners,” says Hubrich. “But if you look at the science behind them, it’s very thorough. In order to be approved as a food ingredient, they go through exhaustive scientific review before they are approved by the FDA.”
Bakal agrees, noting that scientists familiar with the scientific database of all the sweeteners believe that all sweeteners approved in the United States are safe. To back up his statement, Bakal points to evaluation statements developed by the American Diabetes Association, Alexandria, VA; the American Dietetic Association, Chicago; and the American Medical Association, Chicago, among others, all of which support the safety of these sweeteners.
When it was approved for use in savory snacks in 1996, the fat replacer olestra found itself roiled in physiologic controversy. FDA required all products that contained olestra to carry the labeling statement: “This Product Contains Olestra. Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients.” Recent scientific data suggests otherwise, and FDA has since dropped the labeling requirement.
But a position paper on fat replacers published last year by the American Dietetic Association stated “that the majority of fat replacers, when used in moderation by adults, can be safe and useful adjuncts to lowering the fat content of foods and may play a role in decreasing total dietary energy and fat intake.”
Whether low-calorie sweeteners, fat replacers or supplements, the consumer and the food manufacturer should proceed with some caution, but the overall findings for these categories, as well as research on specific ingredients, are available for scrutiny.
Fortunately, legitimate manufacturers do not claim that their products can work alone in the fight against fat. As we have heard over and over, exercise and portion control are among the top methods for staying in shape and reducing calories and fat.
“I would say that reduced-calorie, low-fat products are not a magic bullet,” states Hubrich. “I’m a dietician, and what I like to tell people is that they can be a useful tool in your toolbox, but you can’t have just one tool in your toolbox.”
John Spizzirri is a Chicago-based freelance science and technical writer specializing in the food and food-packaging industries.
