Healthy diet a matter of balance

Many foods are quickly branded unhealthy because they are high in fat, sugar or salt. But it is often consumers' eating habits that are unhealthy, not the foods they eat.

For one thing, harming one's health depends on the amounts consumed. And some products that are supposedly beneficial, such as vitamin pills, sometimes carry risks.

Many people take expensive vitamin pills and dietary supplements in the belief that the substances do their bodies good. But as Alfonso Lampen, director of food safety at the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin, notes, "Very few people need supplemental vitamins. Their vitamin requirements are generally met."