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HEALTH FOODS. The concept of "health food" is attributed to the 1830s Popular Health movement whose founders included Sylvester Graham, father of graham crackers. Reacting against professional medicine, the movement emphasized temperate living, lay knowledge and health care, and health foods as part of the broader feminist and class struggle. A simple vegetarian diet, including whole wheat, and exercise were promoted for physiological and spiritual reform to a more natural, uncomplicated life. Meat, white flour, and alcohol were among the stimulating sinful foods.

John H. Kellogg and his brother Will were the first to become millionaires from "food faddism" (Herbert and Barrett, 1981, p. 87). The Seventh-Day Adventists founded a religious colony and sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, where Kellogg's clients "detoxified" via enemas and high-fiber diets, including cornflakes. By 1899, the Kellogg cereal company's cornflakes competed with Post Grape-Nuts, the latter a supposed cure for appendicitis, malaria, consumption, and loose teeth. Charles W. Post was a former Kellogg patient. Kellogg and the Post Division of General Foods remain giant cereal manufacturers.

While scientists quantified protein, carbohydrate, fat, and later the vitamin and mineral composition of food in the late 1800s and early 1900s, agriculture and industry augmented production. Public health sanitation and vaccinations minimized infections, and the increased stable food supply fed a growing population more fit to work the factories, farms, and military. As home economists taught the nutritional food groups recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), profiteers promoted grander elixirs via speeches, newspapers, books, magazines, and doctors, dentists, and chiropractors with dubious degrees.

Beginning in 1906, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restricted health claims on food and drug packaging, but marketers could nevertheless exercise free speech by offering information in books, magazines, and brochures. Prevention and Let's Live magazines began publication in 1950 and 1933, respectively; the latter was initially called California Health News. They promoted vitamins, food preparation, and exercise and warned of pollution dangers. In the era of World War II victory gardens, Rodale Press began publication of Organic Gardening and Farming in 1942; this later became Organic Gardening and then simply OG. In 1980, Rodale Press grossed $80 million with 2.4 million Prevention and one million Organic Gardening and Farming subscribers (Herbert and Barrett, 1981, p. 99). Amway, Shaklee, and Neo-Life used door-to-door sales to distribute high-priced vitamins with brochures and books; in 1980 these three companies grossed about $700 million from food supplements (Herbert and Barrett, 1981, p. 22).

Health Food and the Counterculture

The 1960s and 1970s counterculture youth questioned the political and economic values of capitalism and experimented with alternative lifestyles. University students created community gardens, cooperative grocery stores, health-food restaurants, buying clubs, and organic farms. Ecology and health food became "cool." Notions of balance were sought from formerly less acknowledged ecological studies and from Eastern or Native American philosophies. In the early 1900s, USDA staff had explored sustainable Far Eastern agricultural practices, but these foods and methods received little attention until organic farming became popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Brown rice, wheat germ, honey, nuts, sprouts, and Eastern foods like yogurt, hummus, falafel, tofu, and stir-fried vegetables were considered healthy, and environmentally sound if they were produced locally and organically. Vegetarian diets, of the non-red meat, lacto-ovo, macrobiotic, and vegan varieties, were adopted to eat low on the food chain or to avoid killing animals. Sugar, white bread, and red meat were considered unhealthy.

The health-food business recognized a market in the counterculture. Adelle Davis, with books like Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit, promoted vitamins and natural foods to prevent psychological metabolic disorders as well as cancer. The Atkins Diet promised thinness through consumption of protein foods, fruits, and vegetables, but few carbohydrates. While exploring non-Western religions and cultures, youth tried ethnic foods, spices, herbs, and recreational drugs. While ethnic variety entered American cuisine, doctors bemoaned the fact that people were not seeking medical treatment but were using useless or harmful herbs and concoctions. Laypeople sought self-reliance over "the establishment" with traditional natural products to achieve holistic mental and physical health.

The professional certification of Registered Dietitian became required by many states in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973, the FDA required enriched or fortified foods to be labeled with ingredients and Recommended Daily Allowance values for protein and seven essential vitamins and minerals.

Small-Scale to Global Mass Marketing

By the 1990s, as the counterculture matured, health-food issues saw compromise such as more integration of nutrition and preventative medicine in medical practice, or scientific evaluation of physiological properties in food beyond macro-and micronutrients. International conservation-development projects found wide use of herbal medicines to the extent that the World Health Organization promoted traditional medicine to cut health-care costs. The U.S. National Institutes of Health researched herbal medicine claims. A recent Physicians' Desk Reference describes herbal uses and contraindications. FDA food label regulations gradually permitted scientifically tested nutrient content claims (for example, "low-fat," "high fiber"), structure/function claims (for example, calcium aids in the growth and maintenance of bones), and a few health claims (for example, calcium reduces the risk of osteoporosis). In December 2000, the USDA defined national organic food standards to regulate health-food claims and to facilitate national and international trade. U.S. organic food sales increased from $178 million in 1980 to $1 billion in 1990 and $7.8 billion in 2000 (Mergentine, 1994, p. 164; Myers and Rorie, 2000).

Natural product sales (including whole foods, organics, supplements, and household products) grew from $1.9 billion in 1980, to $4.2 billion in 1990, and to $32 billion in 2000 (Spencer, 2001). Small cooperative health-food stores persisted, but large "one-stop" natural grocery stores opened in the 1980s and 1990s. Convenience attracted the "hippie" become "yuppie" professionals who retained health and environmental concerns but had little time to produce, obtain, or cook food. Mergers and acquisitions occurred as conventional food conglomerates bought out natural food product lines or whole companies. Regular chain grocery stores carried more organic foods besides conventional foods. The Internet provided both health-food magazine and retailer advertising as well as access to university and medical school websites. The Internet health-food market was initially profitable, but plateaued with delivery limited to nonperishables. Scientifically verified "functional foods" became popular, whether in regular meals, sports foods, or weight reduction. Consequently, antioxidants, fatty acids, phytoestrogens, flavinoids, pro-and prebiotics, are now promoted in a Functional Food Pyramid, mirroring the conventional USDA food pyramid adopted in 1992. Both nutrition education models acknowledge growing scientific evidence that fruits, vegetables, and grains are important to health, with lower emphasis on animal-derived food, compared to the Four Food Groups model used since 1958.

"Functional food," "designer food," and "nutraceutical" are used interchangeably. This is problematic in global trade regulation since food and drugs are compartmentalized differently in international regulatory agencies. Functional food is conventional food, but demonstrates physiological benefits and/or reduces the risk of chronic disease beyond basic nutritional functions. A nutraceutical is a product produced from foods but sold in pill, powder, and other medicinal forms not generally associated with food and demonstrated to have physiological benefit or provide protection against chronic disease (Stephen, 1998, p. 404). The American Dietetic Association classifies all food as functional at some physiological level, but suggests that "functional food" includes unmodified food as well as modified food. While some sports enthusiasts or dieters favor modified processed foods with higher nutrient content, many Americans and Europeans buy organic foods because they worry about allergic reactions and environmental hazards caused by genetic modification.

See also Functional Foods; Kellogg, John Harvey; Natural Foods; Nutraceuticals; Organic Foods; Vegetarianism.

Sabrina H. B. Hardenbergh Hea-Ran L. Ashraf