Functional Foods
Perhaps you began your day with a slice of folate-enriched toast (to protect your heart) slathered with margarine (that lowers cholesterol) washed down with a glass of apple juice with echinacea (hoping to ward off the sniffles.) For lunch, you may have had a bowl of soup spiked with St.John’s wort (hoping to prevent depression.) What’s wrong with adding vitamins, fibre, herbs and extracts to foods that ordinarily do not contain them? Maybe nothing. If research show’s that they’re safe and that they work. Unfortunately there’s no guarantee of either. Welcome to the fastest-growing segment in the food industry – ‘functional food.’
Over the past decade we’ve seen a shift in consumer demand for organic, ‘natural’ and ‘whole’ foods (in the hopes of weight loss and disease prevention), with a preference to get extra nutrients from food rather than from supplements, and heavyweight food manufacturers agree.
In a sense, functional foods have been around since the 1920’s when iodine was added to salt to prevent goitres. Today, we can find everything from gummy bears with added vitamins, snack chips with gingko biloba and teas with added ginseng. Everyone from Kellogg’s to Danone are jumping on the ‘functional food’ bandwagon. Consulting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, (PwC) expects the global market for functional foods to mushroom from US$78 billion in 2007 to US$128 billion in 2013; functional beverages, the fastest-growing global segment, will top US$34 billion in 2010.
Japan was, and still is; the pioneer in Asia’s functional food market, yet China, America, England and other Asian countries are catching up very quickly. So what is all the hype about? Are these ‘miracle’ foods the cure alls they claim to be? And we slates for a future of cake batter and chocolate filled with aspirin and blood pressure medication?
Exert from; Functional Foods, AsiaSpa January – February 2010, written by Gabrielle Tüscher