Functional foods are natural foods that provide health-promoting and disease-preventing benefits in the body. Functional foods include whole, fortified, enriched, or enhanced foods, and dietary, or food supplements. The term, ‘functional foods,’ is used to signify foods and their components that offer health benefits beyond the scope of basic nutrition. Put simply, functional foods meet our minimum daily requirements of nutrients, when taken in adequate amounts, on a regular basis. More importantly, functional foods are also evidenced to promote vibrant health and reduce the risk of disease per se.
Functional foods help us in the management of a host of major illnesses, such as heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders, menopausal symptoms, osteoporosis and cancer, not to speak of relatively less serious conditions, like allergic and sinus infections. Nutritional specialists have identified hundreds of compounds with functional qualities. Also, new discoveries are being constantly made surrounding the multifaceted benefits of functional foods.
The idea of functional foods, also called ‘designer foods,’ is not a recent phenomenon. It has simply been perfected over the years. To pick one classical example — food manufacturers first began adding iodine to salt to prevent goitre, over one hundred years ago. This was, perhaps, the first, truly original attempt made at creating a functional food through enrichment.
As you know, most of the foods we consume are natural, whole foods — fruits, vegetables, grains, marine, dairy and meat products. All of them contain several natural components. Some examples — lycopene in tomato; omega-3 fatty acids in salmon, or flaxseed, and saponin in soya. They do not become functional foods, just because we know them by that name. It is only when efforts are made to improve, or ‘synthesise,’ them, through organic and scientific means, on a continual basis, do they ‘pack’ the supplemental ‘punch’ in a chill ‘pill’ for good health.
Besides, the nutritional content of certain crops is ‘engineered’ through the same agricultural techniques that are used to bring about beneficial traits in plants and animals too. To think of just two examples — beta-carotene-rich rice and vitamin-enhanced soybean. While research is underway to improve the nutritional quality of a number of crops, there as several examples of fortified foods available in the market. Orange juice, for instance, is fortified with calcium. Likewise, cereals and flour are fortified with vitamins, minerals, or folic acid.
Research suggests that consuming functional foods on a regular basis can help reduce the risk of illness. There is, however, no single magic functional potion, or formula, that can cure, or prevent health problems. The best and easiest thing for us to do is to eat a balanced and varied diet every day. This should include at least 4-5 servings of fruits and vegetables as well as foods with added beneficial components. Most important — it is imperative to speak to your physician, nutritionist, or dietician, on modes you could adapt to help reduce your risk of illness with appropriate functional foods, or dietary supplements, which also correspond to your unique, individual needs.
You’d sure think, in the context, what the buzzword, ‘nutraceuticals,’ or ‘phytonutrients,’ is all about. Because, the expression seems to be doing the rounds, much more than its ‘corollary’ — functional foods? Yes. Nutraceuticals are simply functional foods with specific health and medical benefits. They also refer to dietary supplements and/or nutritional ingredients that promote health. The medical lexicon defines a nutraceutical as “any food, or food ingredient, which is considered to have a beneficial effect on health.” The expression denotes any food product, or supplement too, that may have a healthy, functional, or physiological, effect on the body.
The word, nutraceuticals, emerges from two recognisable terms — nutrition and pharmaceuticals. The term is also — as is well-known — broadly used in reference to a vitamin supplement pill, or energy-enhancing pill, and also foods that have functional effects — such as lowering of cholesterol levels.
Nutraceuticals are derived from medically-beneficial foods extracted from selected plants and animal sources. They may also be a part of nutritionally-enriched ingredients used to fortify supplement formulae in a planned and specified manner — to achieve specific therapeutic, or preventative results, or goals. They are also, in essence, used to supply missing nutrients from our diet. For example, folic acid to prevent birth defects and dietary fibre to provide antioxidants to knock out harmful free radicals, or reduce the risk of colon cancer — to illustrate a classical case in point.
In technical parlance, nutraceuticals are natural, bioactive chemical compounds that have health-promoting, disease-preventing, and also medicinal properties. Here are some examples — vitamin, mineral and magnesium supplements, fish oil, glutamine, flaxseed, ginkgo, quercetin, saw palmetto, milk thistle and co-enzyme Q10; energy tablets; prebiotics and probiotics that contain ‘good’ bacteria, such as yogurt [curd], or such supplements, to improve digestive health and also reduce the incidence of heart disease and certain forms of cancer; or, reduce ‘bad’ cholesterol, the foremost ‘example’ being spirulina.
The study and use of functional foods, or nutraceuticals, for nutrition, healing, or therapeutic, purposes is now a rapidly-expanding stream of nutritional medicine — a part of specialised healthcare. It is grounded in the principle that health is more than the absence of disease — just like functional medicine, the new ‘kid’ on the therapeutic block, which also delves into the fundamental causes of illness and exemplifies the need for an ‘integrated’ approach to prevent and treat them.
Health is positive vitality. This is, perhaps, the best expressed definition of health by functional medicine. In other words, functional medicine recognises that wholeness signifies the full function of our body-mind-spirit. It is only in this context can we expect ourselves to feel fully alive, vibrant, and also happy.
Functional medicine, in its essence, is a dynamic approach to assessing, preventing, and treating not just acute affections, but also complex chronic diseases. Just think of it. Our traditional illness model is keyed to look for specific problems and also treat those problems. This is not complete; it is useful, yes. But, do we sometimes not feel there could be more than something we’d dig upon and add to our medicinal armamentarium?
It is this radiance that provides the sparkle for us to think of functional medicine as a key element perched advantageously at the complex inter-related network of causes that eventually manifest as health problems. You could think of the relationship that exists between diet, lifestyle, personal relationships, environment, and genetic factors, to bring home the point.
This explains why the foundational principles of functional medicine are keyed to the understanding that each human being is a unique genetic organism living in a unique environment. This is also the raison d’être for functional medicine to promulgate a patient-centred medical approach that takes into account the unique nature of each of us as being best placed to help ourselves achieve good health and wellness — by using food as part of healthy living and also as medicine by itself.
Notes David S Jones, MD, President Emeritus of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Functional Medicine, US, “It’s clear to anyone who thinks about it. When you don’t have a diagnosable disease, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re fine.” He adds, “We don’t want to limit ourselves to demonstrable problems. We want to go upstream and ask as early as possible, what isn’t functioning properly?” Jones explains, “The problem with the conventional ‘history and physical’ examination is that it’s so compressed. It’s like a closed accordion. The conventional intake process tries to reach a diagnosis quickly and then offers treatment, usually through medications. I loved this system when I first started using it — it was so elegant and so clear. The only problem is that we now know it doesn’t work for 80 per cent of patients, especially those with complex chronic illness.”
Functional medicine uses a template of eight different aspects of functioning, offering a systematic way to look deeply into the core clinical imbalances that underscore various disease conditions. In other words, each functional medical review looks at the following: 1. environmental inputs such as food, diet, nutrition, or nutrients [including air and water] and exercise; 2. mind-body-spirit imbalances; 3. immune and inflammatory imbalances; 4. oxidation-reduction imbalances and mitochondropathy [mitochondrial disorders]; 5. digestive, absorptive, and microbiological imbalances; 6. detoxification and biotransformational imbalances; 7. hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances; and, 8. structural imbalances from cellular membrane function to the musculoskeletal system.
Put in perspective, the essence of the functional medicine diagnostic process is geared to expand the accordion, so that the practitioner looks for and accepts more comprehensive information sources. For example, the history of the individual, or patient, from the point-of-view of functional medicine, includes the whole narrative — when the patient felt well, when they stopped feeling well, and what their physical and social environment was at that point of time. In Jones’ words, “The underlying process that leads one person to get diabetes may be quite different from someone else who gets the same disease — even though the diagnosis is the same.” He adds, “If you really want to get to the underlying mechanism, you have to expand the questions.”
What does this signify? Conventional medicine evaluates the individual, or patient in isolation. Functional medicine expands the areas of assessment. Says Jones, “In conventional medicine you make a diagnosis, prescribe a treatment, and send the patient on their way.” He avers, “[But] that is only part of the job. The other part is to ask the question ‘why.’ A diagnosis should be the beginning, not the end of the journey.”
In a typical setting, practitioners of functional medicine, who are themselves board certified medical doctors, healthcare professionals, or trained clinical nutritionists and dieticians, offer inputs for us to develop a sophisticated understanding of our own health. They provide us collated information in order to help us all to understand the different layers of functioning that go together to make up health, or illness. Their insights help us understand how much information is available and what to look out for when seeking a practitioner — to experience deep, long-lasting healing and optimal wellness.
This bids fair to a major paradigm shift — that the advent of a more rational, curative and preventative functional approach to treatment is not only holistically imperative, and essential, but also appropriate.
— First published in India First
