What I Discovered at the World’s Largest Health Food Show

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

Each year in March, I trundle off to Natural Products Expo West in the Anaheim, California, Convention Center, right next door to Disneyland. Makes sense, as both venues deal in fantasy, and admission to neither is cheap.

A massive show — this year attracting some 70,000 attendees — it featured 3,000 exhibits from 1,800 companies. Expo West showcases thousands of “natural” products available for retail sale: food, supplements, cosmetics, and a sprinkling of “consumer durables” such as yoga mats and nontoxic water bottles.

These companies are top dogs in the — gulp — $153 billion “healthy lifestyle industry.”

This was my 10th annual visit. Expo West always provides a good opportunity to reflect on how consumer culture and healthy living intersect…

… or, perhaps, collide.

I don’t wish to be too cynical about this event, because it overflows with well-meaning people, good vibrations, and many capable physicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs. There are quality products at every Expo…

… but one must look pretty hard to find them.

My two-day tour got off to a worrisome start, as this gentlemen stood just outside the registration tent:

One more reason to pursue a healthy lifestyle — who wouldn’t want to push this date back?

Once inside the convention center itself, the booths and crowds stretched off to the far horizon…

I logged about 12 miles during each of two days walking the aisles. I wore wingtips last year and lost a toenail; this year, my comfy Keens kept my feet much happier. 

What was on display ranged from the odd…

“Ear candling” purportedly sucks toxins from the ear canal (not recommended).

To the very odd…

These “gourmet edible cricket bars” contain 25 pulverized bugs each, along with dates, chocolate, peanut butter, sesame butter, and honey. Not bad!

To the terrifying…

Living Well’s Underground Health Research Nate Rifkin, right, with a fellow “underground” activist.

But virtually all of the food on display was some variant of a processed, shelf-stable grain. There was a great deal of this:

“Healthy” chips of every size and composition…

And this:

Puffed-grain bars, usually cohered via a syrupy binder…

And not nearly enough of this:

This lovely stuff was not for sale… it was for display purposes only. In the sea of grainy, chippy, flaky “foods,” it was a little oasis of actual, you know, food.

Or this:

One of the few foods offered that I could get behind was bone broth in a shelf-stable package… it’s better to make this healing elixir yourself, of course, but modern paleo types can be pressed for time.

It was all enough to send one scurrying for a rubdown…

Miles of aisles take their toll.

Or to another form of relief (more on that below).

Bottom line

It’s called Natural Products Expo West, but a more accurate title would be “Natural Shelf-Stable Products Expo West,” because 99 percent of what is displayed there can sit in a warehouse — or in a truck, or on a store shelf — for weeks, months, or even years.

The reason? Sit-on-the-shelf-forever foods are the only sorts that can lead to large, centralized businesses — the kinds of businesses that come to Expo West to land nationwide distribution and retailing deals.

With very few exceptions, you can’t ship fresh meats, vegetables, and fruits to a central location and then ship them back out all over the U.S. Such foods — especially ultra-fresh, high-quality, organic versions — must be produced and consumed locally.

So the notion that these are exceptionally “healthy” foods is simply untrue. Human beings did not evolve consuming shelf-stable foods, and the fact that the chips there are made of beets, eggplant, or parsnips rather than potatoes, or quinoa or millet instead of corn, does not make them healthier to any significant degree.

It simply made them novel and marketable.

My advice: Food like this that takes weeks or months to spoil should make up a tiny part of your daily diet, surely no more than 10 percent. Get the rest from your local farmers market, community-supported agriculture program, local natural foods store, or, better yet, your backyard garden.

So… is there nothing of value on display at Expo West? Well, my team and I did speak with several supplement manufacturers. I think judiciously selected supplements can play an important role in helping modern Americans reclaim some of the nutrients that they can’t get when they eat nutrient-poor foods — which, given the sorry state of America’s depleted farmlands, is a common situation.

But in the final analysis, for my money, the booth offering the most satisfaction on the Expo floor was the bar, which did a brisk business all day…

I abstained — it was only 1:30 p.m. — but I was indeed tempted.

… and offered one of the few kinds of shelf-stable ingestibles I can heartily recommend.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions