Superfoods!

Some Foods Go Beyond Basic Nutrition, Help Fight Disease

(CBS) 
Americans still care more about how food tastes, whether it is convenient and how much it costs, Balzer said. Interest in food that carries health claims dipped in the mid-1990s and is only now beginning to rebound, he said.

"We often mistake trying new things as a trend," Balzer said. "What we're really looking at is Americans' desire to find `new."'

More of these disease-fighting, health-promoting foods are finding a market, according to the Institute of Food Technologists, the leading professional society in the food science field.

Researchers have found food components with potential to improve memory, ease arthritis and fight heart disease. The report also found that the government often stands in the way of people learning the health-inducing benefits of some products.

For example, juice makers can claim that cranberry products help maintain urinary tract health, but they cannot say cranberry juice cocktail prevents urinary tract infections. That claim is legal in France.

The makers of the butter-like spread Take Control had clinical studies showing it lowers cholesterol. But until they got approval from the Food and Drug Administration, they couldn't put it on the label.

"They had to say something like, `Maintains healthy levels of cholesterol,"' said Fergus Clydesdale, a food science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who headed the study.

"What does it mean? What's a healthy level?" Clydesdale said. "That isn't very good — matter of fact, it isn't true. We knew the product lowered cholesterol."