What are functional foods?

In recent years, consumers have been much more aware of the need to eat healthily. Advertising campaigns have encouraged us to eat more fruit and vegetables, and cut our intake of salt. Many different food products are now available on the supermarket shelves that are designed to be ‘healthy’. This may be because they have lower levels of fat, sugar or salt, but often it is because of the presence of ingredients known to be beneficial to health.

These beneficial ingredients may already be naturally present in the food in sufficient quantity to achieve the desired effect or they may be deliberately added. Examples are fish oils, vitamins, minerals and various other substances.

These products are often described as functional foods. As the name suggests, they are foods that have some extra, health promoting benefit on top of the basic nutritional quality of the food. The health promoting ingredient should be present at a level which is clinically significant and this level can be determined by scientific review. For a claim to be made for a functional ingredient, the scientific review will have to satisfy the conditions set out in the EU Regulation on Health and Nutrition Claims and the claim registered on the EU Register of Health Claims.

Functional foods are important because our calorific intake over the past century has declined steadily in line with our increasingly sedentary jobs, but our nutrient requirement is fixed. Simply eating less food will not provide us with the nutrients we need. Therefore we must eat more nutritious (nutrient dense) foods to keep our diet in balance.

Functional foods are invariably specific to a particular health condition and thus may be grouped into categories such as bone health, digestive health and so on. For more information on the different categories of functional foods see the topics covered here.