Big Food eyes profits in smaller waistlines

by cLIVE cOOKSON - 04/10/2010

"Nestlé milked maximum publicity from its creation this week of a health science business “to pioneer a new industry between food and pharmaceuticals”. "

The Swiss giant’s announcement marks an implicit step toward the recognition by Big Food that it bears responsibility for the unremitting worldwide rise in obesity – though food manufacturers are not yet ready to admit that their products are harmful, as the tobacco industry does. But the decision to invest around $500m over the next decade in Nestlé Health Science suggests that a huge market opportunity beckons too.

Other food companies are now competing to fund (and publicise) research into improving health. Manufacturers Hershey and Mars, for instance, are talking up the use of compounds called flavanols, which occur naturally in cocoa beans, in chocolate products that could benefit people suffering from diseases associated with obesity, from diabetes to heart failure. Such efforts do not always work, as when Unilever spent more than $20m and four years developing Hoodia, a slimming product derived from a plant growing in the Kalahari desert, before giving up at the end of 2008. But the industry continues to seek products that might profit from slimmer waistlines, while also coming to realise that it must act to head off blame for a growing obesity pandemic, before it becomes a target for public opprobrium as the oil and tobacco industries have before.

EDITOR’S CHOICE
Nestlé to take on pharmaceutical sector - Sep-27Michael Skapinker: We need bold action to slow obesity’s march - Apr-19Nestlé’s small measures help Europe sales - Sep-20Public relations therefore provides a powerful impetus to develop healthier products. As Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Nestlé chairman, observed this week, the world already has more than 1bn obese people, of whom 300m suffer from “adipositas”, the German term for extreme morbid obesity. But growing scientific knowledge about the causes of obesity has also pushed the industry forward.

Although an individual’s weight depends on the balance between energy taken in as food and energy expended through exercise and activity – and there has been much debate about the relative impact of changes on each side of the equation – most experts agree now that growing food consumption has had far more effect at the population level than increasingly sedentary lifestyles.

Recent studies by Professor John Speakman at Aberdeen University show that, contrary to the views held by most members of the public, physical activity among the UK population has not changed significantly over the past 25 years. But the average calorie content of food we buy has increased markedly; by 12 per cent per person in the UK and 25 per cent in the US. “It would take an enormous – and impractical – change in physical activity to reverse the obesity epidemic,” says Prof Speakman. “People would have to exercise for four to five hours per day.”

If the fundamental problem is simply that we eat too much fattening food, for a host of social and economic reasons, and few of us have the long-term willpower to eat less, then the most effective solution is for the manufacturers to make healthier products that satisfy the appetite more quickly. Some of the steps are obvious and need little input from the likes of the new Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences, such as continuing to cut excess salt, sugar and unhealthy fats from existing product lines.

Indeed there is a risk that initiatives like Nestlé’s – which focus on the development of new, niche and potentially expensive products for health conscious consumers – will distract attention from the real need, namely improving the industry’s most popular mainstream offerings. Expensive “nutraceuticals” and “functional foods” may benefit those who are sophisticated and wealthy enough to buy them, but they will not make much impact on the poorer and more deprived members of society, who buy cheaply in supermarkets and take-away food outlets.

So far the record of health supplements is not encouraging, even for those who can afford them. Recent clinical trials have shown up most anti-oxidant pills, once touted as a way to ward off cancer, as being useless – and possibly even counterproductive. Indeed the only supplement that seems to command wide support in the medical profession as being worth taking by the general population, at least in winter, is vitamin D.

Equally Nestlé’s move may not be quite as pioneering as it claims. Many of its competitors are arguably further ahead in exploiting the healthy foods sector, and in bridging the gap between the food and pharmaceuticals sectors. Procter & Gamble, for example, has a thriving consumer health division that sells non-prescription drugs. Danone also claims to have focused on healthy foods since the 1920s, when its yogurts were sold exclusively in pharmacies.

The size of the challenge is most clearly demonstrated by the continuing failure of the mainstream pharmaceuticals industry to develop prescription drugs to treat obesity, despite investing huge sums in the search for what would be a blockbuster product worth billions of dollars – if it enabled patients to lose weight safely. So far neither the neurological approach (curbing appetite in the brain) nor the gastrointestinal (reducing food absorption from the gut) has worked well. Side-effects have also taken drugs off the market or discouraged doctors from prescribing them.

Today the only effective treatment for serious obesity is surgery to make the stomach smaller – which is never going to be an acceptable or affordable solution on a mass scale. If Nestlé or any other food company can dream up an inexpensive way to lose weight that is equally effective, the world will applaud one of the great scientific achievements of the 21st century. If not the food industry, and its efforts to profit from slimming, will attract blame just as quickly.

The writer is FT science editor

More Details: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f0af7ee-cda3-11df-9c82-00144feab49a.html