Readership Survey
Society's growing concerns about health, desire to stay young and distrust of technology and mainstream medicine fuel health food craze
BY RACHELLE COOPER
Health food stores, once thought of mostly as “hippie bastions,” have gone mainstream, and health and organic food items now occupy entire aisles in grocery stores. Prof. Catherine Carstairs, History, says this is due to society's growing concerns about health, its desire to remain youthful and its distrust of technology and mainstream medicine.
“All of these factors have contributed to the growing health food craze,” says Carstairs, who is tracing the history and trends of Canada's health food industry and recently conducted interviews with 30 leaders in the industry.
She notes that health food really started to take off in the 1960s. Interest in vegetarianism, the environmental movement and eastern spirituality accounts for some of this growth, she says, but Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, also played a role.
“The book drew attention to the health risks posed by pesticides and herbicides, and by the late 1960s, many people had become distrustful of medicine and science.”
This change in people's attitudes resulted in a huge rise in the number of health food stores across the country, says Carstairs. Toronto went from having 13 such stores in 1957 to more than 100 by 1979.
Another wave of health food stores crested in the 1990s, and by 1999, Ottawa had created the Natural Health Products Directorate to regulate over-the-counter health products such as vitamins and minerals and herbal remedies.
“The Natural Health Products Directorate has added a lot of legitimacy to the industry because it allowed people to make health claims for products,” says Carstairs.
In 2005, an Ipsos-Reid survey found that 71 per cent of Canadians regularly take natural health products. The definition of a “natural” product is becoming more complex, and new products are attracting a different clientele, she says. After St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in 1998 while taking Androstenedione, sales of the natural dietary supplement advertised to increase muscle mass and build training endurance skyrocketed.
Although body builders can now be found perusing the shelves at health food stores, industry leaders report that most of their customers are women and the elderly, says Carstairs.
“What they stressed above all was that the people who came to them were in search of better health, were not finding answers in mainstream medicine and so were looking for alternatives.”
It's only in the last couple of decades that people have begun turning to health food stores for more than just improving their health, says Carstairs. An examination of Alive magazine, a publication that was launched in the 1970s and is still Canada's biggest health food magazine, and a Winnipeg-based magazine called Healthful Living Digest that was launched in the 1940s allowed her to pinpoint when health trends began.
“There's a real emphasis in Alive, especially from the 1980s onwards, on how to reverse aging and remain youthful, which is becoming an increasingly important aspect of the industry.”
