Japan's food companies have come up with a new way to advertise cheap wine, chocolate and potato chips as healthy foods: Pack them with compounds called polyphenols, which might prevent heart disease and definitely are all the rage in Japan.
"Good taste. Good for your body. Twice as much natural polyphenols," declares a recent full-page color ad in Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper for Bon Rouge wine, made by a leading Japanese wine company called Mercian.The screw-top wine, which sells for the equivalent of about $4.80 a bottle and also comes in a blueberry-flavored version, is sweet with a bitter aftertaste. But if history is any guide, it might soon be a big seller. Mercian already has a version of Bon Rouge with 1.5 times as much polyphenols as its regular wine. The health claim helped quadruple sales of Bon Rouge last year, to 7.2 million bottles.
Polyphenols are plant compounds already present in wine, tea, grape seeds and other foods. The compounds created a recent buzz among Japan's baby boomers after television shows reported research suggesting the compounds are antioxidants that may help prevent heart disease. The findings aren't definitive, and some scientists are skeptical.
Still, Japanese companies are rushing to come out with foods -- just about any foods -- packed with more and more polyphenols. If they're good for you, the marketing pitches go, more should be even better.
Meiji Seika Kaisha, Japan's largest chocolate maker, has launched polyphenol-rich chocolates in the past year, with names such as Effectiveness of Chocolate. Its new Polyphenol 3000 is a box of little chocolate droplets that contain 3,000 milligrams of polyphenols for every 100 grams, more than four times the natural levels in the company's regular milk chocolate.
Otsuka Pharmaceutical's food unit is marketing red sweet-potato chips called Slender Snack, noting on its packages in English that the "hot new snack" contains "active oxygen-elimination ingredients."
U.S. companies are also playing a part in Japan's polyphenols boom. Calpis, a Tokyo-based soft-drink-maker that sells Welch's grape juice under license, declares in big letters on its Welch's bottles that the juice contains "a lot of natural polyphenols" -- 300 milligrams in a 180-gram bottle, to be exact.
Scientists say these fortified products may have a higher content of marketing hype than healthfulness. "I think people are jumping the gun," says Liz Applegate, a nutritionist at the University of California, Davis, who is studying the effect of foods containing polyphenols. "There's no evidence that, if people take it at an enhanced level, there's a reduced risk of heart disease," she says.
The food companies say they aren't trying to boost consumers' polyphenol intake to absurd levels, but are just trying to let them get more antioxidant bang for the buck. Mercian's enhanced wine gives even "people who can't drink that much" a chance to down some polyphenols from wine, says a spokesman at the company.
As in the U.S., food companies in Japan must walk a fine line in advertising the potential health benefits of a product. Unlike drug companies, they can't say exactly what the polyphenols may do for the body. They must limit labels and marketing pitches to vague statements about the product's being healthful.
Boosting the amount of polyphenols is no easy task. Wine marketer Suntory says it scouted out the world's vineyards for grapes that contain a particularly generous amount of polyphenols. It is launching a new wine later this month that contains 4,000 milligrams per liter, or twice as much polyphenols as in regular red wine.
Oddly, one product that Japanese consumers aren't rushing to buy are polyphenol supplements, like the grape-seed-extract pills ubiquitous in the U.S. But vitamin makers like Asahi Breweries' pharmaceutical division says the Japanese don't like popping pills the way Americans do and prefer to get their supplements in foods instead.
So instead of touting polyphenol pills, Asahi has opted to launch a line of jellies including plum and beefsteak plant, known to contain polyphenols. "It's a cultural thing," says an Asahi spokesman.