Pharmfoods' Feel-Good Claims: Form or Function?

page 2 of 3 | PREV 1 | 2 | 3  NEXT 

Food or Medicine?

Functional foods aren't new: iodized salt, for example has been around since the 1920s. But with advancing technology, new types of ingredient manipulation are becoming possible. Recent examples include Dannon's Activia yogurt, fortified with bacteria supposed to promote healthy digestion; nutrient-enhanced Glaceau Vitaminwater; Snapple tea spiked with the claimed mood-lifter kava kava; and Mars' CocoaVia chocolate bars containing calcium, folic acid and vitamins. Soon-to- be-released ChocoMed Pure Chocolate will supposedly dispense vitamins and nutraceutical compounds that will provide stress relief, induce sleep, slow the effects of aging and promote healthy bones, according to ChocoMed.

"I don't believe we should be looking to get all our nutrients from soda and cookies," says Bruce Watkins, Ph.D., director of the Center for Enhancing Foods to Protect Health. And those Americans who eschew functional foods typically cite doubts about the products' health claims or poor taste, according to a 2005 ACNielsen survey.

Consumer concerns are well founded, says Higgins, noting she'd rather see food and medicine kept separate. "You'd be better off eating a whole food that naturally contains a nutrient good for the eyes [such as carrots], because it likely has other beneficial nutrients as well, than eating some manipulated, highly refined food that has one or two added ingredients," she says. As an example of what could go wrong, Higgins points to studies showing people had higher cancer rates after taking vitamin A supplements. "It may be too early to fortify foods with nutrients that have a biological activity we don't yet fully understand," Watkins cautions.

Potential Pitfalls and Benefits

Bruce Silverglade, director of legal affairs for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) says that another distressing aspect of the explosion in juice drinks, snack bars and other items is that they are being loaded with herbal medications, from echinacea to kava kava and ginseng. "Herbal medicines and drugs don't belong in the fridge," says Silverglade. "I don't recommend people drink juice with echinacea, because it's only supposed to be taken for a limited time to ward off illness," Higgins notes.

Yet some experimental functional foods currently being tested around the world, such as fruit genetically engineered to deliver vaccines, may have a future role in aiding world health, Watkins says. "Such a food could have advantages in delivering medicine," says Higgins, "as well as nutrition, in a tropical country, for example, where you can't easily refrigerate a vaccine, but it could be protected within a banana." The risks of genetically engineered foods, however, include possible allergic reactions, decreasing crop biodiversity and the serious threat of contamination of the food supply and wild ecosystems. And despite a decade of research, golden rice genetically engineered to dispense high levels of vitamin A has yet to see production.