Perspectives on the 21st century development of functional foods: bridging Chinese medicated diet and functional foods

Abstract

Functional foods, also known as nutraceuticals, medical foods or nutritional foods, are driving food markets around the world and are expected to be one of the emerging trends for the food industry in the new millennium. The concept of functional foods is rooted in a tradition, particularly in Asia, where people have always believed that a balanced diet and some herbal foods are therapeutic. However, while extensive studies in biochemistry and immunology, as well as clinical trials, have been conducted on selected functional foods or ingredients, the scientific features of most traditional herbals remain almost unknown. However, the fastest growing food market in the United States is that of herbal‐based nutraceuticals such as ginseng, garlic and medical mushrooms. This review describes different aspects of functional foods and the Chinese medicated diet on the basis of current knowledge, discusses the building blocks for the science of functional foods and proposes a possible way to fuse a Chinese medicated diet into functional foods.

Methyl jasmonate and yeast elicitor induce differential transcriptional and metabolic re-programming in cell suspension cultures of the model legume Medicago truncatula

“…Particularly important are the triterpene saponins, which, collectively, protect the plant by nature of their anti-microbial (Osbourn 2003), anti-insect (Tava and Odoardi 1996) and anti-palatability and anti-nutritional (Small 1996;Oleszek et al 1999) activities. Saponins also exhibit anticholesterolemic, anti-cancer (Haridas et al 2001), adjuvant (Behboudi et al 1999), and hemolytic (Oh et al 2000) activity, and are important components of a number of herbal medicines Xu 2001). Whole plants of M. truncatula contain over 30 different triterpene saponins, present as a series of mono-, di-and triglycosides of five major triterpene aglycones .…”

Natural Products for Preventing and Controlling Aflatoxin Contamination of Food

“…In addition, the polysaccharides of this basidiomycete have low cytotoxicity for animal cells and could contribute to the nutritive value of the food or feed supplemented with these extracts [87].…”

Novel Food Consumption

“…Thus, the first food f o s h u corresponded to a consumer rice species, which was removed by enzymatic hydrolysis of a protein that causes skin allergy, obtaining a new product safe and immunologically healthy. Over time many terms have been used to identify functional kinds of food, such as designer food, nutraceuticals, genetically-engineered food, farm food, vital food, phytofood/phytonutrients, food of high performance, smart food, therapeutic food, value-added food, genomic food, prebiotics/probiotics, superior food, nutritious hyper food, and real food (Xu 2001).…”