Functional foods or functionally marketed foods? A critique of, and alternatives to, the category of 'functional foods'

Nutraceuticals: Transformation of Conventional Foods into Health Promoters/Disease Preventers and Safety Considerations

Nutraceuticals are essential food constituents that provide nutritional benefits as well as medicinal effects. The benefits of these foods are due to the presence of active compounds such as carotenoids, collagen hydrolysate, and dietary fibers. Nutraceuticals have been found to positively affect cardiovascular and immune system health and have a role in infection and cancer prevention. Nutraceuticals can be categorized into different classes based on their nature and mode of action. In this review, different classifications of nutraceuticals and their potential therapeutic activity, such as anti-cancer, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-lipid activity in disease will be reviewed. Moreover, the different mechanisms of action of these products, applications, and safety upon consumers including current trends and future prospect of nutraceuticals will be included.

Diet in Chronic Kidney Disease: an integrated approach to nutritional therapy

A healthy diet is an essential requirement to promote and preserve health, even in the presence of diseases, such as chronic kidney disease (CKD). In this review, nutritional therapy for CKD will be addressed considering not only the main nutrients such as protein, phosphorus, potassium, and sodium, which require adjustments as a result of changes that accompany the reduction of renal functions, but also the benefits of adopting dietary patterns associated with better outcomes for both preventing and treating CKD. We will also emphasize that these aspects should also be combined with a process of giving new meaning to a healthy diet so that it can be promoted. Finally, we will present the perspective of an integrated approach to the individual with CKD, exploring the importance of considering biological, psychological, social, cultural, and economic aspects. This approach has the potential to contribute to better adherence to treatment, thus improving the patient's quality of life.

Substitute foods are more likely than their traditional food counterparts to display front-of-package references

Innovative, highly processed foods are often designed to “substitute” for traditional, less-processed items in the diet. Yet, concerns about the unhealthfulness of diets high in highly processed foods are growing. Their dominance in the diet has been hypothesized to relate, in part, to the strategic use of on-package nutrition promotion. Our goal was to compare front-of-package (FOP) labelling on highly processed products that appear to have been explicitly designed as substitutes for traditional foods with the FOP labelling on their traditional counterparts. FOP references were recorded from packaged foods in three major Toronto grocery stores ( N = 20520). Foods were categorized as substitute or traditional counterparts if these had (1) immediate interchangeability within the diet, (2) inherently different formulation, and (3) the substitute was more heavily processed than its traditional counterpart. Eight substitute–traditional pairs were identified, comprising 18% of products in the data set. Substitute foods were more likely than traditional products to bear FOP nutrition, “organic”, and “natural” references. Substitute foods bore 1.21 times more FOP references, the majority of which highlighted nutrients inherent to the traditional counterpart. Our findings support the contention that highly processed foods may be displacing less-processed foods at least in part through the use of strategic on-package marketing.

Marketing health education: advertising margarine and visualising health in Britain from 1964-c.2000

During the post-war period, margarine was re-conceptualised as a value-added product with distinct health benefits. This article contextualises the advertising of margarine as a healthy food, focusing on Unilever's Flora brand as an important case study in legitimising the emergent role of disease prevention as a marketing tool. It uses the methodology of visual culture to examine how advertising employed chronic disease prevention as a selling tool. This article assesses how the post-war environment gave rise to new ways of visually advertising food, and how these promoted innovative visualisations of food, the body and their interactions with health.

Materiality matters: Blurred boundaries and the domestication of functional foods

Previous scholarship on novel foods, including functional foods, has suggested that they are difficult to categorise for both regulators and users. It is argued that they blur the boundary between ‘food' and ‘drug' and that uncertainties about the products create ‘experimental' or ‘restless' approaches to consumption. We investigate these uncertainties drawing on data about the use of functional foods containing phytosterols, which are licensed for sale in the EU for people wishing to reduce their cholesterol. We start from an interest in the products as material objects and their incorporation into everyday practices. We consider the scripts encoded in the physical form of the products through their regulation, production and packaging and find that these scripts shape but do not determine their use. The domestication of phytosterols involves bundling the products together with other objects (pills, supplements, foodstuffs). Considering their incorporation into different systems of objects offers new understandings of the products as foods or drugs. In their accounts of their practices, consumers appear to be relatively untroubled by uncertainties about the character of the products. We conclude that attending to materials and practices offers a productive way to open up and interrogate the idea of categorical uncertainties surrounding new food products.

Re-imagining the 'social' in the nutrition sciences

OBJECTIVE

In response to The New Nutrition Science Project's Giessen Declaration, we provide here a case for a more fully described and integrated 'social' dimension within the nutrition sciences.

DESIGN

This paper explores what we mean when we argue for socially engaged nutrition sciences (SENS), and describes the disciplinary fields, epistemologies and methodologies that contribute to SENS' potential rich diversity and value. Additionally, the current positioning of 'social nutrition' research within the nutrition sciences is critiqued.

RESULTS

There is fairly broad acceptance of the 'social' as an important contributor to successful public health nutrition situation analyses, intervention planning and implementation. However, we assert that the 'social' is not merely a contributor, the usual position, but is central. Implications for policy and practice that could follow from this shift in approach are outlined.

CONCLUSIONS

We call for researchers, educators, policy makers and practitioners alike to re-imagine the role and purpose of social science enquiry that could enable the delivery of more socially engaged nutrition sciences.

Food as exposure: Nutritional epigenetics and the new metabolism

Nutritional epigenetics seeks to explain the effects of nutrition on gene expression. For social science, it is an area of life science whose analysis reveals a concentrated form of a wider shift in the understanding of food and metabolism. Rather than the chemical conversion of food to energy and body matter of classic metabolism, food is now also a conditioning environment that shapes the activity of the genome and the physiology of the body. It is thought that food in prenatal and early postnatal life impacts adult-onset diseases such as diabetes and heart disease; exposure to food is seen as a point of potential intervention in long-term health of individuals and populations. This article analyzes how food has become environment in nutritional epigenetics, with a focus on the experimental formalization of food. The experimental image of human life generated in rodent models, it is argued, generates concepts of food as a form of molecular exposure. This scientific discourse has profound implications for how food is perceived, manufactured and regulated, as well as for social theories and analyses of the social body that have a long history of imbrication with scientific models of metabolism.

Functional foods and urban agriculture: two responses to climate change-related food insecurity

Affluent diets have negative effects on the health of the population and the environment. Moreover, the ability of industrialised agricultural ecosystems to continue to supply these diets is threatened by the anticipated consequences of climate change. By challenging the ongoing supply the diets of affluent countries, climate change provides a population and environmental health opportunity. This paper contrasts two strategies for dealing with climate change-related food insecurity. Functional foods are being positioned as one response because they are considered a hyper-efficient mechanism for supplying essential micronutrients. An alternative response is civic and urban agriculture. Rather than emphasising increased economic or nutritional efficiencies, civic agriculture presents a holistic approach to food security that is more directly connected to the economic, environmental and social factors that affect diet and health.