When it comes to eating well, consumers have been sidelined by elaborate health foods when all they have to do is "eat a piece of fruit", a health specialist has said.
Gail Underbakke, nutrition coordinator of the University of Wisconsin Health’s preventative cardiology programme, suggested people have skewed conceptions of what food is good for people.
Speaking at the university’s lecture series entitled In Defence of Food, she asserted this could be because of the aggressive marketing behind what she called "functional foods".
These products will often bolster too-good-to-be-true claims of dietary advantages with dubious research and slick advertising, the expert claimed.
Ms Underbakke pointed out that at the end of the day, these were processed foods after all.
"We have come so far away from basic food that if it doesn’t have a shiny cover and it’s not perfect, we do not think that it is good enough," she added.
One recent example of this was a ruling by the Advertising Standards Agency finding This Water was misleading consumers with claims of being simple and natural.
The rejection was based on the discovery that each bottle contained between 33.6 and 42 grams of sugar.
Noel Plumbly
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