»From what tree came this fruit?

An iconic portion of my diet, the doughnut, is again getting a bad rap.
With the Food and Drug Administration's recent update to the "food pyramid", the slothful among us are encouraged to eat more fruit and veg, and more of the whole grain, rather than refined.
I wasn't especially pleased when Cookie Monster, of childhood staple Sesame Street, changed his tune (literally) and suggested that his namesake is a "sometimes" food.

May 3, 2005

THE CONSUMER
Kick the Doughnut Habit, and Make Your Nutritionist Smile

By MARTICA HEANER
o matter which route Reginald Burns takes when he drives to work each morning in Houston, he knows every doughnut shop along the way. Almost every day, he stops for a fix: a Diet Coke and six doughnuts - any kind as long as they have just emerged from the fryer.

"A hot doughnut literally melts in your mouth," said Mr. Burns, 47, a finance director for a nonprofit organization.

Doughnuts have long been an American breakfast staple. At the same time, their lack of quality nutritional content makes most nutritionists cringe. This contradiction makes them a perfect talking point in the debate over how strict dietary recommendations should be.

Some dietitians believe that people should strive for an ideal diet, cutting out foods that that have been stripped of many nutrients, packed with potentially detrimental ingredients like the unhealthy kinds of fats or both. In this view, doughnuts don't make the cut.

"When it comes to health, the only thing good about them is the hole," Carla Wolper, a senior nutritionist at the New York Obesity Research Center. Other nutrition professionals say that few foods are terrible enough to be banned altogether. Thus, Sesame Street's Cookie Monster now calls cookies a "sometime food."

So what about doughnuts?

Within the sweets spectrum, desserts like ice cream and apple pie have some redeeming value - the calcium in dairy products and the antioxidants in fruit. Even chocolate contains beneficial phytochemicals.

But doughnuts have nothing to offer, said Jayne Hurley, senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group in Washington. They are loaded with sugar, refined flour and the fats known to increase heart disease risk: saturated fat and partially hydrogenated oil that is loaded with trans fat.

A healthy version is hard to find. In a glazed blueberry Krispy Kreme, for example, there is not a blueberry in sight. The "fruit" is concocted from sugar, corn syrup, corn cereal, partially hydrogenated oil, natural and artificial flavors and dyes.

One doughnut is not likely to kill anyone. But purists argue that clever lobbying by the food industry is behind the idea that processed foods, like doughnuts, can be a sometime food.

They point to the government's new food pyramid, which is vague when it comes to suggestions that people limit certain foods. The vagueness, critics say, stems from an agency, the Department of Agriculture, that is charged not only with nutrition education but with keeping farmers and ranchers in business and advancing the marketing of American agricultural products that include many ingredients in fast foods.

The recently released 2005 U.S.D.A. dietary recommendations give a green light to "discretionary calories" from foods that may be high in fat, sugar or alcohol. For example, a person eating 2,000 calories per day is allowed 267 discretionary calories - or about the amount in one glazed doughnut.

Of course, this junk food allotment is only risk-free if a person is not trying to lose weight and has met all nutrient requirements, eating nine servings of fruits and vegetables each day, according to the guidelines. It also assumes that people are able to eat in moderation.

In fact, few people can stop at one doughnut, and consuming six is likely to lead to overeating and to displace nutritious foods.

Cynthia Sass, an author of "Your Diet is Driving Me Crazy" and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, argues that "most people are so far from ideal nutrition that it is unrealistic to expect them to be able to eat perfectly."

"If a person truly craves doughnuts," she said, "quitting cold turkey may lead to rebound binges that can have disastrous affects on weight and health."

Some experts say succumbing to a warm doughnut's allure may increase cravings.

"Foods containing both sugar and fat are the most palatable and have an appealing mouth feel," said Dr. Kathleen Keller, an appetite researcher at the Obesity Research Center, adding that companies "conduct extensive research to determine the exact sugar/fat proportions that are the most enticing."

Such feel-good foods are not only hard to resist, they may actually be addictive in people with a stronger than normal genetic propensity to like foods that are especially high in fat and sugar. Brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging show that lean and obese people react differently not just to eating tasty foods, but even to looking at them.

And high-carbohydrate foods like doughnuts, brain scan studies find, raise the levels of two brain chemicals, serotonin, linked to mood, and dopamine, associated with pleasurable, rewarding sensations, in obese and normal-weight people.

Dr. Walter C. Willett, a Harvard researcher who is the author of "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy," and a hard-liner when it comes to nutrition, recommends that people kick the doughnut habit. "When it comes to health, I do not believe a person should compromise," he wrote in an e-mail message.

But it is not always so easy. Dr. Eric Swartz, a chiropractor in Los Angeles, admits to a lifelong struggle to keep his doughnut consumption in check. "I have managed to limit myself to eating them once a week, but I could not completely give them up because when I'm depressed, they always make me feel better," he said.

Most Americans seem to suffer a similar loss of fortitude in the face of temptation. A study published last week in Archives of Internal Medicine found in a survey that only 23 percent of 153,000 adults reported that they followed the researcher's basic criteria for healthful eating.