Magical or Overrated? A Food Additive in a Swirl

Correction Appended

COLUMBIA, Md.

Skip to next paragraph Multimedia Graphic Martek's Highs and Lows

DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid. Millions have been spent promoting it to food companies.

IT is not easy working inside Martek Biosciences, which has been trying for years to persuade food makers to add an omega-3 fat found in algae to everything from cheese puffs to cornflakes.

"There have been a lot of days where we ask ourselves if we're crazy," said Steve Dubin, the company's chief executive. "You look at yourself in the mirror and have to ask, ‘Is the rest of the world not getting it, or are we the ones out of touch with reality?' "

Of course, Martek has concluded that the rest of the world doesn't get it.

The company, which is based here, between Baltimore and Washington, says it has made that most magical of food discoveries: an essential nutrient that can be added invisibly to the diet without any appreciable impact on taste or eating habits.

Martek has had considerable success adding an omega-3 fatty acid called docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, to infant formula. And, on paper at least, DHA also sounds like the perfect supplement for Americans, who seem to grow more obsessed with healthy eating the more poorly they eat.

If food makers would only sprinkle some DHA into everything from the milk people put in their coffee each morning to the chocolate bars they snack on at night, Martek's scientists say, consumers would end up with healthier hearts, sharper minds and better vision.

But the country's big food companies have not exactly embraced DHA the way that Martek executives figured they would - or should. For several years, the company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars increasing its production capacity in anticipation of a deluge of orders that have yet to materialize.

Makers of infant formula are buying DHA in bulk, but last year Martek booked barely 0,000 in sales to food companies. The company's stock closed at .17 a share on Friday, down 66 percent from its high of .99 in May 2004.

Competition is one reason that Martek's DHA has not emerged as the new calcium, which food makers have long sprinkled into various products from orange juice to cereal. (As a result, the average American consumes more calcium, crucial to bone strength, than in the past.) Fish oil companies also sell omega-3 fatty acids, as a food additive or in gel capsules (Martek sells gel cap versions of its product as well). They promote their products as cheaper, more magical elixirs that are superior to DHA because they also have a second important omega-3 called eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA.

There are questions about the supposed benefits of DHA, whether it is derived from algae or anchovies. The Food and Drug Administration has declared DHA safe, but some nutritionists question the sweeping health claims promoted by Martek and others that sell omega-3s.

"A lot of the claims made for DHA are in the realm of hypotheses," said David Schardt, senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy organization based in Washington. "They are certainly worth pursuing, but there's not yet enough proof to warrant telling people to go out of their way to take DHA."

The exceptions, Mr. Schardt said, are people with a history of heart disease and premature infants, who need an extra boost of DHA for proper brain and eye development to compensate for their early exit from the womb.

Martek's scientists, when pressed, generally agreed with Mr. Schardt. The data showing any health benefits of DHA beyond those related to the heart or premature infants, while encouraging, is not quite conclusive, they say.

Research has suggested that DHA may reduce the risks of Alzheimer's, for instance, but years more study is needed, they say, before any definitive claims can be made.

Yet that has not stopped the company's top executives from promoting DHA's potential health benefits more broadly. "If you have a product that reduces your chance of Alzheimer's," Mr. Dubin said, "if it improves your cardiovascular, if it improves your eyesight, if it improves the health of your baby, then I have to think consumers will say that's worth an extra 25 or 50 cents a day for these benefits."

He may be right. After all, this is a country where people concerned about their cholesterol will cut their egg intake in half but then consume four times as many servings of a fat-rich superpremium ice cream. Our tortured relationship to food might just help Martek's cause.

"My experience in nutrition is that single nutrients rarely produce miracles," said Marion Nestle, a professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of "What to Eat," published last year. "But it's also been my experience that companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it."

For a long time, the typical American diet contained plenty of omega-3, DHA included. But that was when cattle were not trapped in pens and actually roamed the prairies and grazed on grass, which is a good source of omega-3s, rather than eating feed-lot corn and soy, which are not. Eggs, too, used to be a strong source, but chickens have undergone a similar lifestyle change.

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Correction: January 21, 2007

An article last Sunday about Martek Biosciences misidentified the headquarters city of D. A. Davidson & Company, which employs Timothy S. Ramey, a food and beverage analyst who now has an "underperform" recommendation on Martek's stock. Although Mr. Ramey's office is in Portland, Ore., D. A. Davidson is based in Great Falls, Mont.