The Irish Heart Foundation has criticised functional foods as offering more style than substance.
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The IHF’s new nutritional guidelines, released yesterday (16 May), reaffirm the conventional wisdom that eating a wide variety of fresh foods, including fish, fruit, vegetables and whole grains, while consuming less fat, sugar and salt is the best approach to remaining healthy.
The functional food sector, one of the fastest growing categories in the food industry, includes products that claim to improve health and wellbeing. However, the IHF has warned against functional foods becoming a substitute for a healthy balanced diet.
“Functional foods are not a magic bullet or universal panacea for poor health behaviours,” the IHF said. “Emphasis must be placed on the overall dietary pattern.”
Some of the most popular functional foods on the market at the moment are fortified with probitoics and plant sterols. However, according to the IHF guidelines, the effects of probitoics on heart disease are insufficiently documented while, although plant sterols reduce cholesterol in those with an average diet, their long-term effects on heart disease “remain to be shown”.
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