Auburn, April 20---As America approached midcentury more than 50 years ago, many nutritionists believed that the same sort of planning and resolve employed to eradicate polio or land a man on the moon could be used to reverse Americans’ bad eating habits.

Just acquaint Americans with the facts about saturated fat, and they will gladly exchange their greasy spoons for celery sticks, they believed.

What started out as a giant leap toward better eating has been downsized to a baby crawl. Instead of encouraging Americans to make drastic changes in their eating habits, many nutritionists are pursuing a gradualist approach – one they believe will be more realistic and pay bigger dividends in the long run.

Part of this gradualist approach will involve encouraging food processors and providers to tweak the nutritional content of their products for healthier results.

"Nutritionists understand people can’t be made to stop eating things that aren’t nutritious," says Dr. Robert Keith, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System nutritionist. "On the other hand, there are some ways popular foods can be made more nutritious, such as using beef that is lower in saturated fat or finding more ways to incorporate more fruits and vegetables in the diet."

This stealth nutrition, in which popular foods are changed ever so slightly to make them more nutritious, already is being tried – sometimes with promising results.

For example, despite the best advice of Mom and Popeye, many Americans run from any mention of spinach.

So researchers at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville got the idea of using spinach with one of the most popular of American foods – hamburgers -- merely replacing nutritionally puny iceberg lettuce with spinach.

In fact, from a nutritional standpoint, iceberg lettuce pales in comparison to spinach. While iceberg lettuce contains minimal amounts of vitamins and phytochemicals, spinach is a veritable powerhouse, chock-full in vitamins A and C and numerous phytochemicals.

Spinach, for example, contains lutein, which may help protect the eyes from cataracts and muscular degeneration, a progressive condition affecting the central part of the retina that leads to the loss of sharpness in vision.

Taste tests revealed that consumers were not able to detect any difference between the iceberg lettuce and spinach. Consumers rated the hamburgers served with spinach just as high as they did those served with lettuce.

Keith says this already is being used with other products, especially calcium-enhanced products.

"Calcium-supplemented products already have carved out a niche and come in all shapes and sizes these days," he says. "You can buy calcium-fortified orange juice and chocolate tablets."

The popularity of calcium-supplemented products stems partly from the realization among many food manufacturers that there is profit to be made from widespread concerns among women about calcium deficiency and the role this plays in bone loss and, ultimately, in osteoporosis, a widespread and crippling bone disease.

In addition, many restaurant salad bars already are including spinach along with the lettuce, although Keith wonders how many consumers are using spinach exclusively.

Even so, Keith says there’s a way consumers could employ their own variation of stealth nutrition, enhancing nutritional value without compromising taste.

"My advice would be to use a little bit of iceberg lettuce while filling up the bowl the rest of the way with spinach," he says. "That way, you get the crunchiness of the lettuce along with the nutritional value of the spinach."

Other attempts at stealth nutrition haven’t been as successful.

Low-fat soybean burgers, for example, are available in grocery stores and restaurants as a substitute for red meat. While these products have carved out a niche among some consumers, Keith doubts they will never replace old-fashioned hamburgers.

"The trouble in this case is that you’re bumping up against taste and flavor," he says.

"People eat the way they do because they enjoy the taste," he adds. "Nutritional supplements can work but only if people can’t tell a difference in what they’re eating. When people start detecting taste and flavor differences, you’re back to square one."