Everyday foods with pumped-up nutritional profiles--breakfast cereal with 100 percent of eight essential vitamins and minerals, orange juice with bone-building calcium, milk with added vitamin D, bread with folic acid--look like health superstars, but do you need them?
The answer: yes and no. While fortified and enriched foods may help fill nutritional gaps, such as bringing a pregnant woman's intake of folic acid up to par to protect her baby from birth defects, they aren't better than a healthy, balanced diet, nutrition experts maintain. (In the United States, food fortification began in the 1920s with the addition of iodine to table salt to prevent goiter.) Here's what you need to know:
- Fortified foods should still be nutritious in their own right. Look for natural nutrients first and consider fortification a bonus. Choose calcium-rich low-fat milk (it will be fortified with vitamins A and D to help your body absorb calcium); naturally vitamin C-packed, 100 percent orange juice fortified with calcium; and whole grain, high-fiber breakfast cereals (if they've got added nutrients, it's a plus.) A little extra nutrition is fine, but it shouldn't be the reason to choose a food.
- If you take a daily multivitamin (and most of us should), you don't need a day's worth of vitamins added to your food as well. You do need fiber, good fats, and the hundreds of protective phytochemicals in fruits and veggies--many of which have yet to be discovered.
- Don't bother with mood-elevating, brain-enhancing, immune-boosting herbal add-ons. Soup with depression-lifting St. John's wort? Fruit juice with cold-fighting echinacea? Skip 'em. You're better off taking herbs separately, in expert-recommended doses.
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