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.
