Healthy is the new black when it comes to food products. Everyone wants their products to be associated with health benefits. The simple way to do it is to find one ingredient in your product (if you can't find one, add one) that can be clinically shown to be healthy, then promote it like crazy: coffee 'with anti-oxidants', sugary cereals 'with vitamin B', dairy products 'with calcium' and soft drinks 'with real lemon'.
There are loads of unhealthy products, from coffee to chocolate to alcohol to sugary drinks, which claim to be healthy because they contain high levels of anti-oxidants. The thing is, there is no health advantage to eating more anti-oxidants than your body needs. And if you eat sufficient fruits and vegetables, you will not only get as many anti-oxidants as you need, you will also get many, many more nutrients that your body vitally needs. Fruits and vegetables also won't create side-effects in your body that reduce your capacity to utilise the vitamins you are taking in.
What this means is that if you are eating your fruits and vegetables, the anti-oxidants in these unhealthy products are providing no real benefit - so only the negative effects remain. So rather than wasting money on the latest fad or gimmick, eat a balanced, healthy diet and you'll get all the nutrients (and anti-oxidants) you need.
Then there are the low-fat products that fail to mention that they contain loads of fattening sugar. These products take advantage of our reductionist scientific method. We take one small part of the product (the vitamin B) and we do a study to see how it effects one small part of our body (the immune system). We then take the health benefits we see and extrapolate them to say that that means the whole product is healthy for the whole body. To show how ridiculous this is, let's use an extreme example: if I add antioxidants to arsenic, will it make it healthy?
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