Is Our Food Healthy?

How healthy is our food, the stuff we buy in the grocery stores?
Well, if you make a comparison between food in the USA and other developed countries and food in under-developed countries, it is probably the safest and the most nutritionally satisfying food supply possible.

The standards for food inspections and food quality that goes into the manufacture and safety and the formulation of foods is really pretty extraordinary. Is it perfect? No, you can find problems if you look.

Does food processing really take the nutrients out of the food?

It can if manufacturers let it, but it is a marketing power struggle. Some food processing can actually be healthier for you. For example some breads have added fiber, to make it healthier. Food preservatives have been included in the manufacturing process as a necessity to make sure that the food is not rotten and moldy by the time the food gets to you. Have you ever cooked bread from scratch - you'll find that it doesn't store as long as the commercially made breads.
Not all food processing is bad. Typically when fruit or vegetables are cooked it will lose some of its nutrients, but some manufacturers will actually add these nutrients back into the food to compensate.

Does food lose its nutritive value over time?

They can and can't. Take a drink product that claims to have Vitamin C in it.

The manufacturer of this drink has to put an average of that vitamin in the product because some of the vitamins will deteriorate over a period of time. Depending on the temperature of the storage of the product, usually the higher the temperature or the longer the storage time, the more of the vitamin will end up deteriorating.
Vitamin C happens to be one of the most sensitive. The government does inspections on these products. They will randomly do surprise visits and routinely visit the food manufacturing companies to take samples for testing.

When the product is formulated, the food companies will add an average of vitamins. It protects the product during the shelf life.

If they want the product to contain 100% of vitamin C at the end of the shelf life, then they may have to put in 200% to begin with because they know that 2 years later it will have lost half of its value.

Food companies can predict the rate of loss on similar products so that when a nutritional beverage is formulated they can base the level of any particular nutrient against historical values for similar foods.

Food companies use this as the starting point and they will enter the food into something called accelerated storage. That is a higher level of temperature so they can monitor the level of loss.

They call that storage study. Most food companies will do that on their own accord but they do that in case there is ever a government inspection because they want to make sure they are meeting their label claim.

Companies that manufacture vitamins and minerals do the same thing. If it is a dry food like a vitamin tablet the rate of deterioration is usually much slower because it is a dry environment.

Fats can also oxidize. If you have ever had a bag of cake flour on your shelf in your kitchen and two or three years later it is full of weevils and you smell it and it has an awful smell, it is usually because the fat that is present in the flour has oxidized.

How Are Our Food Products Developed

What is the process that new food products go through before they end up on the shelves ?
New food products start with a product development food scientist who works closely with the marketing people of the company. The marketing team helps conceive the ideas for food products like analog products, like a cereal or whatever it may happen to be.

It could also be a fabricated product like a take off of a baked item. You come up with the idea working with the marketing people. You would then put together a prototype of the product idea so that the marketing group would have something they could look at and actually sit around the conference table and talk about.

Then the team would decide which of these products you'd like to develop. One of those products would be picked and taken to the next stage and the product development scientist would begin to refine that product. It might be improvement in flavor or taste or texture.

The product would be refined and presented again to the marketing group. There would be another round table discussion about that particular product and the marketing group would
point the food scientist in the direction he needs to go.

Once the product is approved by research and marketing then you begin to pull manufacturing into the picture who would also then contribute to the development of the food product.

At what point do new food products have to presented to the FDA?

Generally it is the responsibility of the product development people to be aware of the Food and Drug Administrations requirements. Food scientists should have access to a library of different regulations called the Federal Code of Regulations and be aware of all the guidelines.

If there is an aspect of the food that does not comply with one or more regulations, then it needs to be submitted to the FDA, however, if there is no perceived problem or everything is seen to comply with the Federal Code of Regulations by the food
scientist, then the development of the product will proceed without being submitted to the FDA.

How long does it take for products to hit the supermarket shelves?

The development time and the rules and regulations applied to the different kinds of products, whether they are food service items or clinic products all differ. There are varying regulations that govern the formulation of and development of and the marketing of all different products.

For example, Novartis had a line of weight loss products that were very popular. It was the Optifast Line. Within that product line I'm just going to guess there were at least 75 different products. There were different categories of products, liquid, supplements and there would be formulas of products intended to be administered through hospital tube feedings. There were solid foods as opposed to liquid. The products would be tested with years of clinical trials.
Most people have no idea what is entailed in developing a new drug or food product.

Normal consumer groups will make some blanket statement about how the consumer is getting ripped off by the drug companies and the pharmaceutical companies because they are charging 100 times more for their pills than what it costs to manufacture. This is the same even with dietary products. Pharmaceutical drugs are sold for many times what it costs to manufacture the product in terms of the composition and the packaging and the marketing. You put all that together and that is just a fraction of the cost. However the clinical trials that these products go through can run into millions of dollars especially for the larger pharmaceutical companies.
Now the drug companies make A LOT OF MONEY, but there is another side to the picture and that would be the testing that goes into some of these products.