Nutrition

• Functional food – a food given an additional function (often one related to health-promotion or disease prevention) by adding new ingredients or more of existing ingredients.

• a natural or processed food that contains known biologically-active compounds which when in defined quantitative and qualitative amounts provides a clinically proven and documented health benefit, and an important source in the prevention, management and treatment of chronic diseases
• processed food or foods fortified with health-promoting additives, like “vitamin-enriched” products.

Some examples

• fortification – addition of iodine to table salt, or Vitamin D to milk, done to resolve public health problems such as rickets
• fermented foods with live cultures are considered functional foods with probiotic benefits.

Probiotic

Medical food, specially formulated foods to treat diseases with distinctive nutritional needs (e.g., an inability to metabolize a common molecule)

Supplements

That’s engineering

• ferment – to cause to undergo or break down an organic substance by chemical change

Learn more…

• Medical microbiology – the study of microbes, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites, which cause a human illness and their role in the disease.