A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Functional Food

A functional food, or “nutraceutical,” is a food-based product that has added ingredients believed to provide additional health benefits. Functional foods are designed to assist in the prevention or treatment of disease, or to enhance and improve human capacities. They include products like vitamin-fortified grains, energy bars, low-fat or low-sodium foods, and sports drinks. Functional foods have existed since the early 1900s when iodine was first added to salt to prevent goiter. Vitamin D has been added to milk since the 1930s, extra vitamins and minerals to breakfast cereals since the 1940s, and water fluoridated shortly thereafter. The difference between older fortified foods and newer functional foods is that the latter are designed to replace medicine with food, or sometimes to eliminate qualities from the food to make it more nutritious. The key moral issue with functional foods is the way in which they claim to function as medicine, blurring the boundaries between food and drugs. Public health and social justice questions remain about their appropriate use, distribution and regulation. Currently, each nation may determine what kind of health claims a functional food product is allowed by law to make. Typically, food companies can produce items that make general health claims (to promote health) so long as they make no specific claims (to treat diseases). There is no legal definition for functional foods in the United States, and neither pre-market approval ...