HEALTH FOOD SPECIAL.................Throw away all that health food, just eat your spinach

Throw away all that health food,  just eat your spinach   The current million-dollar “nutraceutical“ industry owes a lot to Japan,  where the probiotic drink Yakult was invented in 1935 and which arguably threw open the doors for a whole lot of adjectives for food  such as probiotic, prebiotic, functional and fortified. Hence it's entirely  logical that in Japan, you can buy a beer called `Precious', which is “laced with two grammes of collagen and marketed to women as a beauty treatment with the slogan: Guys can tell if a girl is taking collagen'“, says The Guardian. There's also a burrito with probiotics -though not in Japan (it has been launched by a vegan food company in California.) There are studies that claim to have proved that consumption of  fermented foods, such as sauerkraut and pickles, can reduce social  anxiety in young people. The point is, studies on this sort of “functional food“ are often conducted under dubious laboratory conditions  and don't reflect reallife experiences. Dr Duane Mellor of the British Dietetics  Association says his own research into the alleged mood boosting effects of chocolate is a good example of why it's hard to make definitive claims about specific, targeted health-benefits of food. “There is some evidence that polyphenols, which can be found in chocolate, may improve mood,“ says a doctor. “But it didn't work in my study . When I gave people chocolate their anxiety levels went down, but that was because I was  giving them bags of chocolate, which is a nice thing to do.“ For more: theguardian.com