Nearly 40 years after “functional food” was first coined our understanding of nutrition in health has increased immensely. Dr Anneline Padayachee looks at its origins through to today.
From bullet trains to anime Japan has a long history of innovation and inventions. In food science, Kikunae Ikeda identifying umami as a separate taste in 1908, and Momofuku Ando inventing instant noodles in 1958, are just two examples of this.
From a country of inventors, it’s no surprise that it was the Japanese who first coined the term “functional food” in the late 1980s. They developed the world’s first food policy that legally approved “functional food” as “Food for Specific Health Use” (FoSHU).
According to the FoSHU legislation, foods that claim to have a specific health use must provide strict scientific evidence on the product’s effectiveness and safety with regards to its particular functional health claims, including bone health, gut health promotion, reducing blood glucose levels, and decreasing cholesterol levels.
In truth the concept “foods for specific health use” spans all eras of history and is found in every culture, with Chinese and Indian Ayurvedic medicine being among the oldest in the world.
Western function
In the Western world, the oldest “functional food” is probably Coca-Cola. John S Pemberton, a pharmacist in Atlanta USA, created the non-sweetened, non-carbonated Pemberton’s French Wine Coca tonic in 1866, to provide himself morphine-free pain relief from a severe chest wound he’d sustained during the Battle of Columbus.
He used cocoa, coca wines and kola nuts to create his tonic as these ingredients contained active ingredients (including cocaine) that appeared to relieve pain. Atlanta’s anti-alcohol laws caused Pemberton to join forces with another pharmacist, Willis E Venable, to create a non-alcoholic version.
Purely by accident, they came up with carbonated water version, and with the help of sugar, were able to sell it as a drink (instead of a tonic) that could cure headaches, alleviate nervousness and decrease tiredness.
No one today considers Coca-Cola, or any sugary carbonated drink to have specific health benefits. And yet Coca-Cola, the godfather of sugary carbonated drinks, actually started off as a medicine turned functional drink for specific health use.
While the Coca-Cola story seems far-fetched today, it isan example lived out across “functional foods” in supermarkets globally, where formulations are fixated on one health imparting component without taking the entirety of all ingredients.
What is function?
Functional foods are not just foods for specific health usage. With our understanding of nutrition, health impact and functional outcomes increasing, foods with nutrient function are also classified as “functional foods” too.
The most famous example being margarines infused with plant sterols with the aim of lowering cholesterol. Unilever is credited with developing the first plant sterol spreads specifically for patients with high blood cholesterol levels in the 1960s.
In consultation with medical researchers and nutritional scientists, the first formulations were based on understanding specific nutrient mechanisms of action in the body (e.g. plant sterols on cholesterol metabolism).
Overtime, these spreads have become available to the general public, showing that medical science, nutritional science, and food science can join forces to create products with specific health functions.
A new era
Given that nutrition science is only about 220 years old, our understanding of nutrients and the food matrix (i.e. the architectural structure) is growing immensely. We know it is not enough for a food to contain nutrient X, at amount Y anymore.
Rather, we are moving into an era where it is also essential to know if that nutrient is both bioaccessible (i.e. released from the food matrix and ready to be absorbed) and bioavailable (i.e. has been absorbed and able to be used by the body).
Functional foods of the future will need more accuracy behind claims as our understanding of nutrition and the factors that affect release (bioaccessibility) and uptake (bioavailability) increases.
As we know better, we have to do better. In one sense, this may seem somewhat complex and overwhelming. In another, it opens up a whole new product category: “naturally nutritious foods with function”.
Naturally functional
Functional foods predominantly have been the territory of processed, formulated foods, with specific ingredients added for a specific purpose. Infant formula is a perfect example of an ultra-processed food product, comprised of at least 20 functional ingredients formulated with nutrition and health outcomes in mind.
But if “nutrient function” is now becoming part of the “functional food” criteria, then this allows unprocessed/less processed foods to also possibly be marketed as “functional foods”.
Fruits, vegetables, milk, lean animal proteins (e.g. steak, chicken, fish) are all one ingredient foods. A banana is a banana. Milk is milk. Oats are oats. Eye fillet steak, a part of the tenderloin muscle, is still just steak.
These one ingredient natural whole foods are not based on a formulation that includes functional ingredients, and historically have precluded functional health claims. Until know.
Our understanding of nutritional science is spanning into bioactive components and nutritional composition including nutrient-nutrient interactions and the role of the food matrix on absorption.
Oats are a great example of a naturally nutritious food with function. They are a source of beta-glucan, a soluble fibre naturally occurring in the cell wall of the oat grain, that has numerous bioactive functions in the body including decreasing cholesterol, improving insulin resistance, and is currently being assessed for its immune supporting anti-cancer properties. Oats could be the Rolls Royce of breakfast cereals due to it’s innate functional properties.
Milk is another example of a naturally nutritious food where nutrient-nutrient interactions affect function. The bioavailability of magnesium and calcium in milk is actually enhanced due to the presence of lactose (milk carbohydrate) and casein (a type of milk protein).
Galactooligosaccharides, a type of prebiotic (beneficial gut bacteria food) is also derived from lactose, and has a beneficial effect on the gut microbiome. Clearly functional evaluation is just as important as nutritional composition and safety evaluation.
Functional foods are here to stay because consumers expect more than just a full stomach from the food they eat.
Healthspan – the time in an individual’s life where they experience good health – is fast replacing lifespan, the length of time one is alive.
Nearly 40 years after “functional food” was first coined, our understanding of nutrition in health has increased, and with it so too has the opportunities for researchers and commercialisation to come together in the creation of formulated functional foods while also identifying naturally nutritious foods with function.
And just like Coca-cola, when we know better, we have the opportunity to do better.
