Functional foods: healthy choice or hype?

Functional foods, foods with extra 'healthy' ingredients added, are being touted as the answer to a range of conditions from high cholesterol to iodine deficiency. But are they real health food or just hype?

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For much of human existence, food has been a source of nourishment, nutrients and, if you're lucky, some enjoyable flavours.

But in a quest for better health, scientists are now stripping food back to its bare essentials to identify what it is about certain foods that make them so good for you.

These discoveries have led to the rise of so-called 'functional foods' – processed foods that have additional ingredients added to them to enhance their health benefits.

As you walk around the supermarket, you will find plenty of examples of functional foods: orange juice with added calcium, pasta fortified with iron, bread fortified with iodine and folate, margarine that helps lower cholesterol, and yoghurt cultivated with specific bacterial strains.

There is plenty of health hype around functional foods, and their price often reflects this, but how much of a health kick do functional foods really give?

Nutritionist Dr Rosemary Stanton believes functional foods are overwhelmingly a marketing exercise, and have no place in a healthy, balanced diet.

"Many functional foods are designed to replace something that … you would normally get in fruits and vegetables," says Stanton, citing one example of a cracker enriched with lycopene – a chemical found naturally in tomatoes – that can reduce the risk of some cancers.

"They often try to produce something as good as fruit and vegetables, which I think is crazy when we've already got fruit and vegetables."

(W.F.Net - by Bianca Nogrady )