Functional foods come of age: two thousand years ago, Hippocrates said, "Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food." Was he anticipating the advent of functional foods? And, will functional foods follow the difficult path supplements are now experiencing?

Prepared Foods, Sept, 2004 by Manny Stern, Loren Israelsen

Functional foods and nutraceuticals are redefining the boundaries between what is defined as a food, drug and dietary, supplement, and how, all these are being used to maintain health. Functional foods have become a top U.S. food industry research and development priority.

What are the implications for the traditional supplement industry that is buffeted by bad press, ephedra notoriety and renewed government scrutiny? Can it ride out the onslaught of big food business as it usurps its traditional mission, namely, the delivery of specific nutrition via pills and powders?

Here is a look at the evolution of attitudes toward food's role in health maintenance and disease prevention. When did the food industry get into the act? Is it in it to stay? And, how is the supplement industry to react and recover its footing?

Touting Health

The Institute of Medicine (Washington) defined functional foods in 1995 as: any modified food or food ingredient that may produce a health benefit beyond the traditional nutrients it contains. This definition was improved to include: foods that have a positive impact on health, physical performance or mental well-being over and above their intrinsic nutritional value.

Although people have always felt food performs a function beyond hunger satiation, "knowledge" was absent in many food beliefs.

Freed of British rule in 1783, Americans retained the British culinary tradition for another century. However, while British staples such as pork and molasses were popular, Americans distinguished themselves by consuming much larger quantities than their British forbearers. The colonists did not take advantage of the richness of local flora and fauna. They turned their backs on most new local foods until some--such as potatoes, tomatoes and corn--found acceptance in Europe and were re-imported to the New World.

By the mid-19th century, the human body was viewed as an engine. Food was seen as the body's fuel, and it did not differentiate between various substances. In 1860, Ladies Home Magazine summed up the conventional wisdom by stating "the most useful articles of diet are the commonest" and what mattered was the mass of food ingested, which varied according to individual sex, size and profession. Thus, a woman needed 20oz. of food per day, whereas a prizefighter needed 36oz. per day.

Science and Pseudoscience

Following work by the German scientist Justus von Liebig between 1840 and 1850, researchers began to separate foods into proteins, carbohydrates, fat, minerals and water. The "New Nutrition" movement was born and soon gave rise to its own faddish falsehoods. In attempting to bring benefits of the new science to the lower classes, Americans were urged to eat more white flour and fewer potatoes because the former was a much cheaper source of carbohydrates. Wheat bran and potato skins were to be discarded as refuse. Tomatoes had no nutritional value. If one insisted on eating green vegetables, they were to be boiled to death to make them easier to digest.

From the 1890s through the early 20th century, various forms of vegetarianism arose. Known as the Golden Age of food faddism, raw foodists, fruitarians, nutarians and lacto-ovarians each touted the merits of their respective obsession. Meat eaters had their own ax to grind, such as the Salisbury all-meat diet. Uniformly, advocates of these drastic dietary recommendations attested to their efficacy via personal experience or other anecdotal evidence. Sound familiar?

However, in 1867, von Liebig concocted what is perhaps the first true functional food, baby formula in powder form. The product attempted to replicate the then-known nutrients in mother's milk. By the end of the 1890s, Nestle's (Vevey, Switzerland) "Best for Babies" powdered milk was being manufactured and distributed by a New York City firm. Unfortunately, by 1898, it became evident that babies fed proprietary foods and condensed milk had higher mortality rates than babies who were breast-fed. Again, bad science led to bad and dangerous products.

Birth of the Vitamin Age

Elmer McCollum, a pioneer of New Nutrition ideology and a leader in the discovery of vitamins, was able to prove that illness could result from the absence of certain elements. This was a radically different nutritional approach. For the first time, dietary deficiency diseases could be directly related to the absence of specific vitamins in the diet. Beriberi and scurvy, due to a lack of vitamins B1 and C, are cases in point.

From 1915 to 1930, a number of vitamins were isolated. However, methods of synthesizing them were not discovered until later. Hence, the only way in which they could be obtained was by eating suitable foodstuff. The inability to properly assess the quantity of vitamins in foods (the analytical methods were not available until the 1930s) made it impossible to recommend how much of a specific kind of food should be consumed. One result was that some food advertisers made extravagant claims. Manufacturers had a field day, with many tiptoeing on the borderline of dangerous misinformation.