To Your Health

A. In 1845, Peter Cooper dabbled with and patented a product that was set with gelatin. His wife, May, named it Jell-O. Since then Jell-O has become the staple comfort food in hospitals as well as potluck suppers. Jell-O is now the brand name of a gelatin dessert from Kraft Foods. Other companies make the same thing and just call it "gelatin dessert." The ingredients are sugar, flavors, colorings, and gelatin.

Gelatin is made from cow hooves and skin. It is not made from horses or other animals. It is basically the same material as your toenails, only finely ground. It is not a vegetarian product, but soy "Jell-O," fortified with calcium and vitamin C and containing valuable isoflavones, is now available. Also, similar desserts set with agar are vegetarian and do not require refrigeration.

Making your own Jell-O from unflavored gelatin and fruit juice is smart. Because Jell-O does not need refrigeration to set (it's just helpful if you want to eat it sooner), until the 1920s and the advent of refrigeration it was made with boiling water and then left to cool and set at room temperature. When any food gets cold it has less taste, so the original Jell-O probably needed less sugar and artificial flavor. If you've ever made your own Popsicles by freezing fruit juice, you may have noticed that they don't have as intense a taste as store-bought Popsicles, or even as much as a regular glass of fruit juice. If you make your own Jell-O using concentrated juices, try reconstituting the juice with about half the water called for. Also, along with fruit, mild-flavored vegetables can be hidden away in this tastier Jell-O.

Jell-O brand gelatin dessert is 90% sugar and less than 8% protein. Its vitamin and mineral content is truly negligible (zero in almost every case), and the quality of the protein is also questionable. In 1973, Roger J. Williams at the University of Texas published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science the results of biological tests comparing the nutritional value of Jell-O to a number of other foods. Jell-O scored even worse than plain sugar, suggesting that the presence of the unbalanced protein in Jell-O was worse than no protein at all.

The artificial flavors and colors in Jell-O are probably not toxic enough to account for this observation, and your homemade Jell-O with added fruit is superior in many ways to commercial Jell-O. Decades ago Dr. Benjamin Feingold proposed that these artificial colors and flavors were the cause of hyperactivity in some children. Many strongly disagreed with this notion, but in June of 2004 the results of a double-blind crossover study (the "gold standard" in research) involving more than 1,800 children were published in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The study concluded that there is a "general adverse effect" of artificial food coloring and preservatives on the behavior of 3- to 4-year-old children that is detectable by parents though not by a simple clinical assessment. The study also ruled out allergy as the cause of this hyperactivity.

The presence of artificial colors and flavors, along with the considerable amount of sugar, strengthens the argument for making your own Jell-O.