Institute For The Future

Functional foods hit the L.A. scene

Another hip and trendy fad? Celebrity-studded restaurants in Los Angeles are now offering menu choices that specifically claim to boost immunity and offer other health benefits. A New York Times article describes several such restaurants, including Crustacean, a modern Vietnamese place.

 

Crustacean hired nutritionist Ashley Koff to identify which of its menu items had

'ingredients that brought forward minerals and phytochemicals,' . . . referring to chemical compounds derived from edible plants and fruits that are believed to aid cancer prevention.

Crustacean has added an icon to the left side of several menu items to indicate those dishes that supposedly boost immunity, based on Ms. Koff's criteria.

For example, there is the Buddha roll, which has shiitake mushrooms (which have iron and Vitamin C, Ms. Koff said), lemongrass mushroom soup (lemon grass has folate, zinc and iron) and wild salmon tartar, which features cucumbers (vitamin C, folate and vitamin A), wild salmon (omega 3, selenium), garlic (selenium, phytochemicals) and red onion (vitamin C and copper, among other things).

My late mother, a biochemist, always taught me that eating fresh fruit and vegetables was good for me, and so was salmon; she also believed in the medicinal powers of garlic. But I suspect she would share Harvard Medical School associate professor of microbiology Michael Starnbach's skepticism about whether any one item on a menu boosts immunity:

[T]here is not enough hard evidence to prove that any food can enhance the immune system. "There is no doubt these menu items have these nutrients. . . . But that is different from the claim being made on the menu."

Nonetheless, my mother would approve of people making healthier choices about what they eat. The Health Horizons Program has been exploring the connection between food and health for a while now. The article quotes a former Beverly Hills High School student (who started his own company distributing a health drink called Kombucha juice in his kitchen at 16) that sums up the shift people are making in their understanding of how food is an integral part of health:

“People more and more are understanding the importance of good health, and how priceless it is. . . . Previously, health foods and health products were a very niche product, like for Berkeley free-spirited tree-hugging people. . . . Now people realize that the immune system is the foundation of our lives.”