V. Conference. FUNCTIONAL FOODS: FRIEND OR FOE?

Resumen

 Globally, trends in the consumer’s consumption of healthy foods, functional foods, dietary supplements, and nutraceuticals continue out strip the growth pace of conventional foods. Overall, the global market has been estimated to reach $90 billion USD by 2013.  These trends are driven by a desire to find preventive or curative measures through foods and lifestyle changes to ameliorate growing societal and financial distress of the aging population who are struggling with heart disease, Type II diabetes, hypertension, some cancers, dementia and obesity. Yet before food manufacturers consider the efficiency of a functional food or functional ingredient in the prevention or decreased risk of a disease, of paramount importance should be food safety. The safety of functional foods should be based on long standing principles that foods are safe and an objective evaluation process must establish that the food is safe at the recommended usage level. Additionally the safety assessment should consider the diversity of consumers with their wide range of age, lifestyle, nutrition status, and genetics. It appears that providing safe and valid functional foods can be even more challenging in a global world with specialized ingredients incorporated into them from numerous countries, which then highlights the critical need for harmonized food safety standards. Here it should be emphasized that food is only as safe as the standards of the weakest ingredient supplier or manufacturer in the food supply. This paper discussed the current challenges of specific functional food products. The goal is to ensure that the end product is both effective in providing a decreased risk of a specific disease state as well as being safe such that any contraindications are minimal or absent. Of importance is the need to verify that all ingredients in the product do not contain adulterating contaminants (e.g. heavy metals, illegal pesticides or di-ethylene glycol). The latter needs to be a continuous concern of not only the manufacturer of the final product but that entity should employ increased scrutiny of the GMPs of any ingredient supplier (domestic or foreign) and an examination of the good agricultural practices (GAPs) of growing and the handling and processing GMPs of any added specific herb or botanical. Ensuring this before the product is introduced into the marketplace is paramount to achieve the desired health benefit.