In the years following the 1977 Dietary Goals and the 1982 National Academy

游客2023-12-14  27

问题     In the years following the 1977 Dietary Goals and the 1982 National Academy of Sciences report on diet and cancer, the food industry, armed with its regulatory absolution, set about reengineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and fewer of the bad. A golden age for food science dawned. Hyphens sprouted like dandelions in the supermarket aisles: low fat, no cholesterol, high fiber. Ingredients labels on formerly two or three ingredient foods such as mayonnaise and bread and yogurt ballooned with lengthy lists of new additives—what in a more benighted age would have been called adulterants. The Year of Eating Oat Bran—also known as 1988—served as a kind of coming out party for the food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran’s moment on the dietary stage didn’t last long, but the pattern now was set, and every few years since then, a new oat bran has taken its star turn under the marketing lights.
    You would not think that common food animals could themselves be refigured to fit nutritionist fashion, but in fact some of them could be, and were, in response to the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines as animal scientists figured out how to breed leaner pigs and select for leaner beef. With widespread lip phobia taking hold of the human population, countless cattle lost their marbling and lean pork was repositioned as "the new white meat"—tasteless and tough as running shoes, perhaps, but now even a pork chop could compete with chicken as a way for eaters to "reduce saturated fat intake". In the years since then, egg producers figured out a clever way to redeem even the disreputable egg: By feeding flaxseed to hens, they could elevate levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the yolks.
    Aiming to do the same thing for pork and beef fat, the animal scientists are now at work genetically engineering omega-3 fatty acids into pigs and persuading cattle to lunch on flaxseed in the hope of introducing the blessed fish fat where it had never gone before into hot dogs and hamburgers.
    But these whole foods are the exceptions. The typical whole food has much more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionist, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t quite as readily change its nutritional stripes. To date, at least, they can’t put oat bran in a banana or omega-3s in a peach. Depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might either be a high-fat food to be assiduously avoided or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced. The fate and supermarket sales of each whole food rise and fall with every change in the nutritional weather while the processed foods simply get reformulated and differently supplemented. That’s why when the Atkins diet storm hit the food industry in 2003, bread and pasta got a quick redesign while poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the carbohydrate cold.
    A handful of lucky whole foods have recently gotten the "good nutrient" marketing treatment: The antioxidants in the pomegranate now protect against cancer and erectile dysfunction, apparently, and the omega-3 fatty acids in the (formerly just fattening) walnut ward off heart disease. A whole subcategory of nutritional science—funded by industry and, according to one recent analysis, remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study—has sprung up to give a nutritionist sheen (and FDA-approved health claim) to all sorts of foods, including some not ordinarily thought of as healthy. The Mars Corporation recently endowed a chair in chocolate science at the University of California at Davis, where research on the antioxidant properties of cacao is making breakthroughs, so it shouldn’t be long before we see chocolate bars bearing FDA-approved health claims. Fortunately for everyone playing this game, scientists can find an antioxidant in just about any plant-based food they choose to study.
    Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound "whole-grain goodness" to the rafters. [br] Which of the following will the author possibly agree with?

选项 A、People are too obsessed with nutrition.
B、People are becoming healthier nowadays.
C、People should improve their eating habits.
D、People should pay attention to food science.

答案 A

解析 观点题。由全文内容可知,作者对食品科学的到来持批判的态度,对加工食品和所谓的营养认定表示反对。同时,作者在为天然食品鸣不平。由此可以推断出作者可能同意“人们过度迷恋所谓的营养”的看法。因此答案为[A]。[B]“当今的人们更健康了”,原文中并没有任何暗示,排除。[C]“人们应该改进饮食习惯”,原文中并没有提到,排除。[D]“人们应该关注食品科学”,与作者的意图相反,排除。
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