Our California roadtrip to Natural Products Expo West is over. We spent three full days in the aisles of the Anaheim Convention Center, visiting exhibitors, talking with retailers and looking for the Next Big Thing.

Among the top performers at this year’s show were products that were enhanced, infused or improved with the addition of ingredients like antioxidants, or omega-3 fatty acids. There was a lot of tea, chocolate and coffee with fair trade certification. Kid cuisine continued to show improvement with a new round of healthful snacks and meals. And there was a generous splash of value-added waters. Many touted higher pH’s. The alkaline formulations of 8.0 or more were promoted as more nourishing for cells.

If there’s a common thread that ties these disparate categories together, it’s that they represent the hottest movers in the supermarket today. What we saw this past week wasn’t groundbreaking, but retailers can take heart that the products they currently stock promise to get better, and there are still plenty of consumers eager to purchase these items.

There was not only plenty to see, but plenty to listen to. Author Michael Pollan delivered the keynote address at this year’s show, talking about “our national eating disorder.”

“Food-related, chronic diseases are what kill most of us in this country,” he said, noting we are becoming a Lipitor nation, a place where our Western diet causes Western diseases like diabetes.

Pollan’s hypothesis behind this phenomenon clearly resonated with attendees. America’s ongoing obsession with individual nutrients like fat and carbohydrates reduces the significance of whole foods, and the complex interactions between nutrients as they are consumed and metabolized by the body. The country believes in this approach, which he calls nutritionism.

The problem is we still know so little about the science of good eating. There has yet to emerge a definitive best practice to this art. And so, it’s better to keep things simple. Pollan put it this way: “Nutrition is like surgery in the 16th century. It has a lot of promise and is interesting to watch, but I wouldn’t get on the table just yet.”

With cloned meat, Monsanto sugar beets and the like making headlines these days, it seems GMOs are once again on the minds of consumers and the food industry. Judging by the buzz at this week’s Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, companies are looking to take action.

One organization that’s taking the lead is the Non GMO Project, a nonprofit working to establish a voluntary standard and label claim for GMO-free products. Right now they’re campaigning for retailer support and signing up manufacturers interested in completing the standard’s certification process, which they’ve posted for public comment until April 29th. The organization hopes to have a working standard in place by Fall 2009.

The Non GMO Project’s standard looks to address three areas: traceability, segregation, and sourcing. Each step focuses on keeping a product out of contact with genetically modified ingredients, and accredited labs throughout the country will do the testing to make sure that happens.

Supporters said that a certification like this can’t come soon enough. The majority of American commodity crops contain GMO ingredients, which the FDA has OK’d but have been linked to harmful health effects in some studies.

“I don’t believe we’re winning this war,” said Michael Funk, CEO of United Natural Foods and one of the founders of the Non GMO Project, during a presentation on the topic. He went on to tell audience members to “Educate consumers. Talk to your neighbors and make them aware of what’s going on.”

A lot of the top players in the natural and organics industry are behind the project: Whole Foods, Nature’s Path, Organic Valley, UNFI and White Wave Foods, to name a few. So the issue is definitely gaining momentum, not to mention publicity.

But for supermarket retailers, GMO labeling like this is a tricky prospect. After all, with so many products that do contain GMOs on shelves, how do you promote a label like the Non GMO Project’s without disparaging much of your inventory? And perhaps the most difficult hurdle is defining that term “GMO” for consumers.

Still, the organic industry had many of these same challenges, and look at where it’s ended up.