Vitamins Hide the Low Quality of Our Food

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/vitamins-hide-the-low-quality-of-our-food.html?rref=opinion

by boh • 11 years ago

63 85 11 years ago

"require refocusing our diets on minimally processed foods that are naturally nutrient-rich"

Great, I'd like to start today. What do I eat? Where do I get it? I already try to do this, but with all this conflicting information out there how am I supposed to know what to do exactly.

Too many articles bemoan the state of nutrition, in the United States in particular, but provide no actionable guidance to the reader.

mkramlich• 11 years ago

simplified cheatsheet: rice, beans, nuts, fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk (for calcium and vitamin D)

prepare in variety of ways. hot or cold. add spices for taste. sometimes meat for protein and iron. walnuts for omega 3 fatty acids which brain needs but body can't produce. eat healthy snacks like washed pre-peeled carrots, etc.

I'd argue this is well-solved, well-known and already well and often communicated.

for example, there are books on this topic. many. anyone can read today.

derefr• 11 years ago

milk (for calcium and vitamin D)

There's got to be some place we got this in the ancestral environment that wasn't animal milk. Our nearest animal sibling primates don't drink animal milk, and presumably have the same requirement for them that we do. So, where do they get them? Consumption of bone marrow, perhaps?

pavel_lishin2• 11 years ago

It seems that every decade, if not more often, the consensus of what is and isn't healthy changes. Sometimes it's due to fad diets, sometimes it's due to a typo, and sometimes it's just because this is complicated and sometimes we get closer and sometimes we get further from a perfect understanding.

Hopefully, the general trend is to move closer, though.

VLM2• 11 years ago

"Hopefully, the general trend is to move closer, though."

The general trend has always been to move toward the more profitable. Scientific research has never been a part of the decision making process.

logn2• 11 years ago

I see a lot of changing guidance around what works for weight loss and what helps prevent specific diseases. However, I think the science has been relatively stable for reaching healthy levels of vitamins and minerals .

free2rhyme2142• 11 years ago

Actionable guidance:

1. Eat high alkaline foods that are organic, non gmo and make sure your diet is 80% alkaline, 20% acidic foods.

2. Fast regularly to clean out toxins

3. Make sure you drink water that isn't completely fluoridated.

4. Get daily exercise for a minimum of 1 hour per day

5. Limit processed and animal based foods

6. Don't consume any dairy products

"If man made it, don't eat it." (Jack LaLanne)

"You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of reality." (Ayn Rand)

Sources: the pH Miracle by Robert & Shelly Young, Jack LaLanne, Paul Bragg, Ayn Rand (for kicks)

fabian2k• 11 years ago

The pH of the human body is tightly regulated, your diet can't really influence it all that much. Any dietary recommendation based on food pH is almost certainly pseudoscience.

It's amazing how much pseudoscience you managed to cram into this short list. Fasting to eliminate "toxins" and avoiding fluoridated water are based on pseudoscience or conspiracy theories as well.

nether• 11 years ago

toxins

bobcostas55• 11 years ago

And then there's THIS guy.

logn2• 11 years ago

Broccoli (5 cups), peanuts (1.5 cups), and milk (3 cups) will give you 100% of recommended intake for known nutrients/minerals/vitamins.

So too will eating a good balance of meat, vegetables, legumes, and fruit (except iodine).

matt40773• 11 years ago

google "eat food, mostly plants, not too much" – it's Michael Pollan's summary of how to eat healthy. There's a long NY Times article and a short book based on it.

By "food" he means "food your great-grandmother would recognise as such". A good rule of thumb is to focus on foods that don't have an ingredients label. Anything that is green is also a good bet – leafy plants are incredibly complex chemical cocktails and the human body evolved in tandem with it.

cbd19846• 11 years ago

By "food" he means "food your great-grandmother would recognise as such".

So, no sushi, no fresh fruits except the few which were available around here circa 1900s, no African food, no Asian food, etc.

A good rule of thumb is to focus on foods that don't have an ingredients label.

Yes. By all means, eat food which could contain who knows what.

leafy plants are incredibly complex chemical cocktails and the human body evolved in tandem with it.

This only applies to foods found in the Rift Valley in Africa.

cbd19846• 11 years ago

If the food has what we need how is it necessarily low quality?

This just sounds like the naturalistic fallacy.

Brakenshire• 11 years ago

The problem is we don't know what we need.

cbd19846• 11 years ago

This is simply wrong.

wyager2• 11 years ago

The article never actually established what made food healthy. Just because something is "natural" does not make it good (and conversely, something being "unnatural" does not make it bad). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

It made brief mention of a few chemicals the author claimed "processing" disrupted, but didn't really expand on that.

If the food has all the chemicals we need, what does it matter if it's "low quality" by the author's standard? If the food doesn't have all the chemicals we need and this isn't obvious, that's a failure of our nutrient tracking scheme.

pavel_lishin2• 11 years ago

The article mentions that it's not just a matter of having 20 grams of X, and 100% of our daily requirement of Y - a lot of these things seem to work together in concert, as catalysts.

qnaal• 11 years ago

If the food has all the chemicals we need, what does it matter if it's "low quality" by the author's standard? If the food doesn't have all the chemicals we need and this isn't obvious, that's a failure of our nutrient tracking scheme.

Our 'nutrient tracking scheme' does not claim to be 100% complete, any more than any other science. I feel it's legitimate to discuss differences between 'naturally' healthy food, and food that is notably deficient being 'fortified' with our best guess as to what's missing.

frozenport2• 11 years ago

See the comment about broccoli. Today's science doesn't known the chemicals required in a healthy diet, missing some may lead to health problems like cancer. Indeed, this is one of the problems with products like Soylent as long-term risk (for example, cancer) remains poorly understood. You don't want to be eating the stuff for 10 years and realize you doubled your risk for cancer.

zo1• 11 years ago

"You dont want to be eating the stuff for 10 years and realize you doubled your risk for cancer."

I'm not following... How does that not apply to "natural" foods as well? Without resorting to an appeal to nature.

lotsofmangos• 11 years ago

Just because those two things are poorly understood (and I think you massively underestimate how much we do know about both cancer and diet) doesn't mean that you should worry about solyent doubling your cancer risk. The same logic of having no good information to go on would have you simultaneously optimistic about it halving it. Missing knowledge doesn't define risk, it defines error bars.

pippy• 11 years ago

"Today's science doesn't known the chemicals required in a healthy diet"

This is quite ridiculous. We've mapped the nutrients required by our cells down to a molecular level. We've even got a thorough understanding of the interaction between the food we eat and how the microbial ecosystem in our digestive system breaks down our food as we digest it.

We have less understanding of the "natural" foods we eat. We've only mapped only a few genomes of the stable foods, let alone a complex break down of the exotic foods in the grocery store isle. The cocktail of organic molecules in the average fruit or vegetable is overwhelming, and many of them have been proved to be highly carcinogenic. Apples for example contain arsenic, amongst other poisonous chemicals. You get diarrhoea after eating too many fruits because of this. You also have pesticides, fertilisers, preservatives, and packaging contamination in 'natural' food.

I'm not against eating healthy, but the "we don't know if it causes cancer" banter is quite arrogant.

The concept of Soylent is great as it can be tailored for human requirements.

VLM2• 11 years ago

The author is talking like a chemist or a chemical engineer WRT "low quality feedstock" "low quality source" and language like that.

Here's a typical journal article about Vit C stability while stored. Sealed, its actually pretty stable... assuming your seal is really good.

http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jac/papers/vol2-issue4/D024...

There is another way to talk about "low quality" which is WRT discourse. There's a widely held belief that there is a constant fixed long term demand for certain substances that is invariant between people with the possible exception of demographics (prenatal vitamins, and advertising campaigns relying on selling higher priced mens/womens products to men/women). Then that compounds with liberal arts grad types thinking vitamin / mineral / supplement / medication are mere synonyms that can be freely safely interchanged to sound good in written prose. Finally experimental data shows that regardless of what was sealed into the package at the factory or farm or factory farm, somewhere between a little bit and practically all of the vitamin decays before you eat it (also cooking destroys / leaches out nutrients, etc)

This all leads to the engineering comedy of your food having 3 sig figs of "percent of US RDA of vitamin C for an imaginary person eating an imaginary 200 calorie diet". When in reality its closer to 1 sig fig at best and all we really know for sure is completely removing it from your diet for a couple months or eating months of the supply at one sitting will make you really sick. Oh and another thing we know for certain, is a lot of people make a lot of money by making sure the public is poorly informed and anxious about the topic, but that's also a given in all the other areas of the consumer economy.

raverbashing2• 11 years ago

"The article never actually established what made food healthy"

"If the food has all the chemicals we need"

Well, this is complicated.

You won't die if you take all the needed vitamins and have the needed intake of macronutrients (proteins and fats, carbs are not "needed")

However, it's not healthy for the following reasons:

- Fibers. Not exactly needed, but healthy.

- Electrolytes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-electrolyte_imbalance (You can die from this)

- Other substances that have an effect even though they're not necessarily a nutrient, like the Broccoli one.

- Foreign substances coming from processed foods and that are not present in natural foods (or just synthetic ones, conservatives, colouring, etc)

freshhawk• 11 years ago

This is explicitly addressed:

"The problem with this approach to nutrition is not that there’s anything inherently wrong with synthetic vitamins — it’s the shortsighted nutritional philosophy that our obsession with vitamins encourages. Sure, our easy access to synthetic vitamins means that we’re no longer likely to die from acute vitamin deficiency diseases. But extra vitamins do not protect us from the long-term “diseases of civilization” that are currently ravaging our country, including obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes — many of which are strongly associated with diet."

There is no appeal to nature anywhere in this article, but a general concern that hubris with regards to our knowledge of nutrition is dangerous, especially given that we have obvious serious health problems going on that our approach has caused.

Genmutant3• 11 years ago

"In fact, for products like milk and flour, where fortification and enrichment have occurred for so long that they’ve become invisible, it would be almost irresponsible not to add synthetic vitamins."

How come most countries don't do it, then? At least in Germany I have never seen added stuff in milk or flour.

SixSigma• 11 years ago

Not just "irresponsible" but adding them in the UK is a legal requirement :

http://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/flour-and-ingredients/organic-flo...

Organic Plain White Flour 1kg

Ingredients:

wheat flour* (contains GLUTEN), statutory ingredients (calcium carbonate, iron, thiamine & niacin).

DanBC• 11 years ago

Lots of countries do do it, although you're right that Germany doesn't.

http://www.ffinetwork.org/regional_activity/europe.php

Here is the law for England & Wales; Northern Ireland, and Scotland.

http://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdfs/b...

antirez2• 11 years ago

Same in Italy, but many people here buy fresh milk, and I guess the same is true in Germany. It lasts only 3/4 days but is only treated with light pasteurization that leaves most nutrients unaltered.

barrkel3• 11 years ago

Few people buy fresh milk in Germany. Almost all milk in supermarkets is UHT, and fresh milk is typically only drinkable for a couple of days, and is frequently almost soured even when you buy it.

UK supermarkets on the other hand sell filtered milk (at a premium price). Filtered milk stays and tastes fresh for over a week.

code_duck2• 11 years ago

Do people in those countries typically eat whole wheat or "enriched" white flour? Fortification of white flour attempts to replace the nutrition that was stripped away by processing, with only partial success. Whole wheat is rarely fortified with anything since it doesn't need it.

Genmutant3• 11 years ago

We normally use "normal" white flour for many things like cakes and pasta and stuff. But we have maybe more "real" bread which is not made of white flour?

walshemj2• 11 years ago

Do they not add iodine in salt in Germany?

Genmutant3• 11 years ago

Yes, they do. I think that's the only one which is (normally) fortified.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

Looking around, it sounds like they didn't:

The practice of putting iodine into food had been banned in West Germany since after World War II.

    http://www.thyroid-info.com/articles/germanyiodine.htm

In Germany it has been estimated to cause a billion dollars in health care costs per year.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency#Deficiency

But, supposedly are in the middle of iodizing their salt.

robbrown451• 11 years ago

The key phrase is "where fortification and enrichment have occurred for so long that they’ve become invisible."

That is, if you suddenly stop doing it, you have a problem. In Germany, presumably, they are already finding other ways to get those vitamins.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

As I read about the subject, it sounds like they didn't have a good source of those vitamins, as most of the land that makes up Germany is iodine deficient- so even foods supposed to be high in iodine, are not. So the way they found was to iodize their salt.

The information seems to be spotty though.

300bps• 11 years ago

I had elevated liver enzymes (i.e. signs of liver damage) for two annual physicals in a row. My doctor tested me for all the usual culprits including all types of hepatitis and everything came back negative.

She then asked me if I took a daily multivitamin. I told her I did and she told me to stop taking it. That was 12 years ago and I have not had elevated liver enzymes since. According to my doctor, people that get enough vitamins and minerals through their diet can actually overdose on the sledgehammer of vitamins in a typical Centrum-style multivitamin. This can then cause liver damage which shows up in an ALT/AST blood test.

I think it's prudent to only take vitamins for which you know you are deficient either because of dietary restrictions or through actual testing. For example, my vitamin d level gets low in the winter time so I take vitamin d3 for that.

yid• 11 years ago

This sounds like an excellent use case for blood-level monitoring for personalized medicine (or in this case, vitamins). I'm not sure how viable the hardware aspect is, but there are sure a lot of things you could do in software with a real-time stream of that data.

teekert• 11 years ago

But what does a typical American eat then? In my country (Netherlands) we eat fresh vegetables every day, we cook every day using many different ingredients and usually Rice, Potato of Pasta as the basis. Is it so typically American to eat highly processed foods? Don't you have a vegetable department in the stores? Here it would also be quite expensive to buy prepackage stuff as one gets peppers, cucumbers, zucchini etc for under 40 cents a piece, a bag of washed fresh spinach is about 1 euro, potatos costs less than 50 cents/kilo. Veggies are even cheaper now that we are not allowed to sell to Russia.

I have worked with Italian colleagues, they are even more puristic. Is this really a cultural thing or are vegetables just so expensive in the US? Are you not taking the time to cook? (about 30 min hands-on a day for preparing warm meals is considered normal here.)

darkxanthos• 11 years ago

Southern California native now living in Chicago. Most of the meals from my childhood were packaged TV dinners we microwaved. Nowadays I will slow cook a soup once a week in a large crockpot. Maybe cook 2-ish other times during the week and the rest is pre-packaged or eating out. Others probably do better, but to your point, people like me exist. :)

amalag• 11 years ago

US people in general eat a lot of processed, canned and frozen food. Even in the areas where fresh foods are available. I see even many immigrants who don't do it in their home countries do it when they come here.

I do think vegetables are overpriced in general grocery stores. The large asian grocery stores are pretty fairly priced.

pXMzR2A• 11 years ago

we eat fresh vegetables every day

that shit's very very expensive here.

stcredzero4• 11 years ago

No it's not! Green Beans. Cauliflower. Broccoli. Brussels sprouts. None of that's "expensive." I've been feeding myself exclusively on ordinary grocery store veggies, steak, and fish. It's not expensive or time consuming at all, and it's quite delicious when you catch on to how to do it, which you will very quickly, if you cook all your own meals.

stcredzero4• 11 years ago

Vegetables are relatively cheap. It's just that in the US, cultural traditions are mish-mashed and weaker, and the food industry is motivated to increase their profit margin though selling "value add" which is really just "perceived value add" and amounts to processing and packaging.

I do all my own cooking, exclusively roasting and steaming, and don't even use carbohydrate rich foods like rice or pasta as a staple. I have steamed or roasted vegetables every day with almost every meal.

One thing I've noticed is that my fellow Americans tend to make a lot more work of vegetables than they need to. They're much too elaborate with washing, and are way too fussy with ingredients and extraneous prep. Just boil, roast, or steam vegetables. Add some salt and butter or olive oil, and you can call it done. So long as the vegetables are fresh and not overcooked, they will taste amazing! (Also, get as fancy as you want, but the best and most complex flavors come from fresh foods.)

zyxley• 11 years ago

Is it so typically American to eat highly processed foods

Yes.

Don't you have a vegetable department in the stores?

There are a large number of Americans, especially the poor, for whom the only nearby "grocery stores" are bodegas, convenience stores, minimarts, etc, from which the supply of fresh foods tends to be limited at best. Add to that how spaced out everything in the US is and how poor Americans may not have a car or the free time to drive a considerable distance to a proper grocery store and back and stocking up on anything but the shelf-stable basics can be pretty hard. Take a look at "food desert" maps for more information.

Here it would also be quite expensive to buy prepackage stuff as one gets peppers, cucumbers, zucchini etc for under 40 cents a piece, a bag of washed fresh spinach is about 1 euro, potatos costs less than 50 cents/kilo

Where I live, in a fairly low cost of living city, prices from a local grocery store start out at $1 apiece for bell peppers for cucumbers, $0.80/pound for potatoes, and $2/pound for apples or broccoli. Increase from there for most other big cities, or for people living in food deserts who have to spend their time getting to a real grocery store if they want anything approaching reasonable prices for fresh stuff.

By contrast, even convenience stores and minimarts will often have processed foods available at a cost low enough to approach those of "real" grocery stores, since canned foods and frozen dinners don't go bad if they're left on the shelves for too long.

jandrewrogers• 11 years ago

It is mostly people not taking time to cook due in large part to a rushed lifestyle. Fresh vegetables are ubiquitous, diverse, and cheap. Also, in most parts of the US, you have to drive a significant distance to the grocery store; it is much easier to cook interesting food if you only need to walk down the street to get fresh ingredients.

One thing to understand is that the typical American diet tends to be regional and varies considerably across those regions. For example, where I currently live (Pacific Northwest) people eat relatively little processed food, in part because they have unbelievable access to fresh ingredients. On the other hand, when I lived in the central US, it was a blend of heavily processed food and fairly limited central/eastern European cuisine. This reflects what is available locally as well as the ethnic history of a region.

In my experience, some parts of the US have a much more diverse and widely available fresh vegetable selection than Europe. This is particularly true in the western US, which is where many vegetables come from. If you are lucky enough to live on the west coast of the US, you can buy a very wide range of fresh vegetables for almost no money all year long. What is available locally is seasonal but augmented by vast greenhouse operations and vegetables shipped in from other latitudes, which is simple in North America. In fact, the lack of vegetable diversity at any point in time compared to what I am accustomed to is one of my complaints about eating in Europe, especially in winter.

tripzilch2• 11 years ago

As a Dutchman, I want to point out that you can multiply those prices by about 1.5 unless you like to shop around a lot, have access to some extra cheap streetmarket place, or the vegetables in question happen to be in season (which is not right now, for most vegetables). A cucumber is 89 cents at the AH, last I checked.

Street markets are cool, but they happen to cost me over 30 minutes to shop (lots of impressions), and are not any of my regular bike routes. They do indeed have cheap veggies but you need to walk around and check to get the good deals, which I am usually too tired to do at the times I ride past them. So I often choose to use a supermarket anyway, where I know what I can get, where it is, and get out within 10 minutes or so.

mrxd• 11 years ago

I'm not sure what universe this statement is true:

we refuse to change our eating habits in the ways that would actually protect us, which would require refocusing our diets on minimally processed foods that are naturally nutrient-rich

It doesn't seem to be the one I live in, where all the trends of the last decade or longer have been towards various "natural" food diets. Even Walmart sells organic food. "All natural" is an extremely common marketing slogan and has been for decades. I know many "health conscious" people, and none of them are obsessed with vitamins.

The facts about vitamins vs minimally processed foods may be true, but the article seems to seriously mischaracterize American food culture.

glesica• 11 years ago

I suspect the trend is much more prevalent among higher-income and better-educated individuals (not necessarily the same group). It is also important to note that "all natural" is not an FDA regulated statement, therefore it is effectively meaningless.

matt40773• 11 years ago

This confusion might be due to different meanings of the word 'natural'. You can get a certified organic frozen pizza, but it wouldn't be 'natural' in the sense the article uses. The best definition is probably 'everything that doesn't have an ingredients label'.

stcredzero4• 11 years ago

I'm surprised that roasting isn't more popular in the programming community. Supposedly, we like having devices do the work for us, and we're known for getting jazzed about emergence. Why don't more of us apply this to cooking? (As an aside, my inclination is to cite a decline in education and a distancing of knowledge from the real world, as in: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education)

Instead of doing a lot of fussing over our cooking, most of the time, for everyday meals, we should be sticking things into the oven with olive oil, salt, and pepper, then letting the magic of roasting magically create wonderful flavors for us. (Garlic? If you feel like changing it up, go for it! I've solved the "garlic peeling problem" so it's a good way to change things up. It's a mistake to be too consistent with flavoring, so garlic every time isn't necessary, needed, or wise, IMO.) Also keep in mind, that unless you are one of them, you aren't cooking to impress your "foodie" friends. You have a different set of priorities. So a helpful thing to do, in your own mind (NOT out loud) tell all your "foodie" friends to "smeg-off!" Go ahead and do things "wrong." So long as you're okay with it. It's your relationship with food, not theirs!

Steak, cauliflower, fish, asparagus...so many wonderful things to have as everyday meals, and if you approach the task with efficiency in mind, the overall wait is usually 30 to 45 minutes, but active preparation/labor time is very slight. Do very minimal prep, stick something in the oven, go and play a game or write some code, then take really yummy complexly flavored food out of the oven.

Truth be told, some of us who aren't very focused on food thoughtlessly imitate people we shouldn't imitate when we cook. One example: How often do you get out a cutting board and use a full sized chef's knife? I haven't used a full sized chef's knife in over a year and get out a cutting board most often when I just need a place to set ingredients. Let's face it, we aren't chefs! We aren't pulling amazing feats of multitasking rapid culinary excellence. We don't need such a highly specialized and versatile tool to rapidly accomplish a dozen different operations and exercise well honed skills as we zip around in a restaurant kitchen. Basically, it's the inversion of the "teaching" segment in Ratatouille: You are your mother! Cut your broccoli in the air over your bowl or pot. Use a really sharp knife. (Look up the Victorinox Fibrox knife http://amzn.com/B0000CFDD5 then look at this video by America's Test Kitchen. That $24 knife has the same grain size and performs as well as the top-rated $300 knife in the video, and it's cheap enough for you to simply donate and buy a new one every year.)

I now cook all my own food, I roast and steam everything, and the effect is that I eat better than I ever have while doing just a fraction of the work I used to do. "Change your relationship to food" with Soylent? Nah. (Tried it.) An oven, judicious use of aluminum foil, a baking pan, a pot with a steamer insert, and olive oil. Use your brain and observe what you do and adjust it to your priorities. (I call it "hyper-lazy cuisine for programmers.")

ch• 11 years ago

Use olive oil for dressing. For adding flavor in a broil look to lard, tallow, schmaltz, or whatever juice is poured off the meat in the main course (assuming a non vegetarian diet here). Might look to coconut oil in the case of vegetarian or vegan, though it's no sub for lard.

stcredzero4• 11 years ago

For adding flavor in a broil look to lard, tallow, schmaltz, or whatever juice is poured off the meat in the main course

That often makes a wonderful sauce for vegetables, for no more effort than just pouring it into a bowl or over the vegetables.

cbd19846• 11 years ago

If the food has what we need how is it necessarily low quality?

This just sounds like the naturalistic fallacy.

dalke• 11 years ago

Quoting from the article:

The problem with this approach to nutrition is not that there’s anything inherently wrong with synthetic vitamins — it’s the shortsighted nutritional philosophy that our obsession with vitamins encourages. ...
Indeed, natural foods contain potentially protective substances such as phytochemicals and polyunsaturated fat that also are affected by processing, but that are not usually replaced. If these turn out to be as important as many researchers suspect, then our exclusive focus on vitamins could mean we’re protecting ourselves against the wrong dangers. ...
.. extra vitamins do not protect us from the long-term “diseases of civilization” that are currently ravaging our country, including obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes — many of which are strongly associated with diet.

This is not a naturalistic fallacy. As my example, which I think is more direct than phytochemicals, consider that alcoholism can lead to B1 deficiency. In the 1970s people proposed vitamin fortified alcohols, which would prevent the institutionalization of 1,200 alcoholics yearly (in the 1970s) due to Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. (See http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2706&dat=19780812&id=J... for a newspaper article from the time. The PubMed reference is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/96343 .)

This wasn't done because, as I recall, the labeling of "vitamin fortified" would likely influence some people to consume more alcohol, on the idea that it was healthier because it contains vitamins. Unfortunately I can find no reference to this decision, and I'm not sure my memory is correct, since http://www.newsweek.com/are-vitamin-enhanced-alcohols-heathi... says "Stampede Light Plus beer, fortified with B vitamins, is soon planning a relaunch. The beer first got its start with Jessica Simpson, who touted it in ads urging beer guzzlers to "Be Smart, Drink Smart.""

Beer is low quality nutrition. Adding vitamins to beer does not make it high quality nutrition.

Vitamins Hide the Low Quality of Our Food

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