ATLANTA -- Maybe it's just the company that ketchup keeps. But even sober-minded dietitians cannot hold back a smirk when this question comes up: Is the inseparable companion of the french fry and the burger, the fellow traveler of all manner of dietary riffraff, actually a health food?
Like oat bran, maybe? Or tofu?Yes it is, the H.J. Heinz Co. argues in all seriousness, and it is busily repositioning its flagship condiment as just that. It's the lycopene, you see.
Lycopene is the nutrient that makes tomatoes (and ketchup) red. Pound for pound, ketchup is the richest dietary source -- 2 1/2 times better than fresh tomatoes since cooking releases their lycopene. And there is evidence, although it is still far from a certainty, that lycopene somehow wards off prostate cancer.
Ergo, ketchup is more, much more, than a mere condiment.
Heinz is hardly alone on this tack. About the hottest thing in the food biz these days is groceries with health powers, stuff that does more than just keep us from starving.
Ketchup and other old standbys like tea and nuts are getting image makeovers. Other perfectly ordinary food is being gussied up with new and often unlikely combinations of herbs and vitamins.
The plan: Get people eating for the purpose of warding off diseases. It's food as medicine.
This category is called functional food, a term that seems to be winning out over the even less appetizing "nutraceuticals" and "pharmafoods." The hard sell was on display in Atlanta recently at the annual meeting of the American Dietetic Association, a gathering of 9,000 dietitians that doubles as a trade show of healthy foods.
The 70,000-square-foot exhibition floor swarmed with mostly female conventioneers cruising the food booths for samples that ranged from the nutritionally plausible to the odd and beyond. It turns out that dietitians are just like regular people. They will eat almost anything that is free. Even "healthy" doughnuts.
Sue Rhodes, working the Super Bakery booth, urged the dietitians to try the vitamin-fortified doughnuts, which are intended for school lunches. "These are healthy, good-for-you doughnuts," she said, even though they looked -- frosted and sprinkled -- exactly like the unhealthy kind.
Karen Kirostek, a dietitian from Pittsburgh, snagged half a glazed one, took a tentative nibble and kept walking. She seemed unconvinced.
"It's still fried in fat," she said. "It probably has a lot more nutrients, but healthy?"
Maybe she would have felt better about the Calci-cookie!, offered nearby, a chocolate chip cookie laced with 500 mg of calcium.
Kirostek's skepticism seems to be standard among dietitians about this entire new food genre. By training and temperament, they are a cautious lot, suspicious of the high-this, low-that eating fads that sweep the populace. They are even dubious about the idea that particular foods are good or bad. In their view, a little of practically anything can be part of a varied and healthy diet.
"Functional foods show some promise, but we need a lot more scientific evidence before we make recommendations to the public," said Joanne Kouba, a dietitian from Loyola University in Chicago.
Kouba sipped a free cup of Lipton tea. Is it good for her? "I have no idea," she said.
That's not the answer the food industry hopes for.
Behind her were stacks of Lipton brochures promoting tea as something more than a warm drink with caffeine. Although larded with qualifiers, the literature raised the possibility that drinking tea might prevent heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
Like all functional foods, tea is talked up for its micronutrients. In this case, it's flavonoids, the natural molecules that are presumed to suppress the damaging effects of oxygen on the body.
Tea and many other functional foods come by their nutrients naturally, and their backers like to list them in biochemical detail. For instance, the Flax Council of Canada points out that flax seed is high in alpha-linolenic acid and lignans. Alpha-linolenic acid is one of the omega-03 fatty acids, like fish oil, that may prevent heart disease and cancer. Lignans are phytoestrogens, which may prevent cancer by interfering with the damaging effects of estrogen.
"May" is the most important word in those last two sentences. Milk (calcium), grapes (phenols), carrots (beta carotene), broccoli (sulforaphane) and beef (linoleic acid) all have their champions as functional foods.
But they are also exceedingly complicated conglomerations of nutrients. No one can say with certainty whether a particular oxygen-protecting nutrient explains why people who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables seem to have less cancer and heart trouble.
Soon after the dietitians' meeting, the Food and Drug Administration announced it will allow food labels to say that soy is good for the heart. This is the gist of dozens of studies showing that people who eat a lot of soy have fewer heart attacks. Clare M. Hasler of the University of Illinois said the market for functional foods is now about $15 billion a year and is likely to grow more than 10 percent annually well into the 21st century. Some of the combinations border on the weird