"Industry Response to Plants Not Pills"
This is the famous study that started so many down the wrong track.
Thousands of men followed for 19 years, and there was a stepwise drop in the risk
of lung cancer for smokers that got more and more beta-carotene in their diet,
which they just estimated by adding up how much fruit, vegetables and soup they ate.
So did they start treating smokers with fruit, veggies, and soup?
No, they gave them beta-carotene pills.
And those taking the pills got more lung cancer than those that didn't,
and more deaths from lung cancer, heart disease, and stroke,
and a shorter average lifespan overall.
Didn't stop them from trying it over and over again, though.
Six more studies performed, and beta-carotene pills continued
to increase mortality.
Twenty other studies in which they gave beta-carotene
and other antioxidant supplements, significantly increased mortality.
An obvious conclusion is that isolated nutrients are drugs,
but not studied or regulated as drugs, and perhaps they should be.
Food, on the other hand, needs to be treated in a different way,
cognizant of the food synergy concept.
The whole food is greater than the sum of its parts.
Yes, low beta-carotene levels in the blood
increase the risk of heart disease mortality,
but that's just basically saying low carrot, pumpkin, collard greens, and kale intake
increases the risk of heart disease mortality,
or here in the US, having a carrot, spinach, and sweet potato deficiency.
Yes, the more carotenoids we have in our blood, the healthier we may be,
but though unscrupulous marketers may use this to sell dietary supplements,
responsible scientists and food producers need to emphasize
the use of foods and whole food products to improve blood carotenoid concentrations.
We can now see that giving supplements of beta-carotene was a misguided way
to prevent cancer. Instead, researchers maybe should have sought to determine
which foods worked best and then put fruits and veggies to the test
in randomized controlled trials.
'Science' tends to be reductionist, looking for discrete causes and effects.
It is hard to get food studies past peer grant reviewers
unless they take the food apart, which seems to us to miss the point.
The key is to encourage consumers to increase the total amount
to 9 to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables every day.
The past 30 years have seen the development of an enormous body of evidence
on the importance of plant-based foods in preventing
or the reducing the risk of chronic disease.
But despite broadly disseminated public information programs
on how to eat healthily, it is extremely difficult to get people to change their diets.
Therefore, one proposed solution is to add back the health-promoting
phytonutrients that are missing from many convenience foods.
By adding more fruits and vegetables?
No, silly, by genetically engineering phytonutrients into fast food.
People eat ketchup, not kale, so who needs greens
when you can genetically engineer high-folate tomatoes?
Why buy berries when you can make tomatoes purple
by stitching in two genes from snapdragons to make transgenic tomatoes?
Instead of soybean burgers, we can have soybean genes
in the ketchup on our burgers.
And you've heard of grape tomatoes? How about really grape tomatoes?
Pills are more profitable than plants.
But when pills don't work, industry will try to patenting the produce itself.