Functional Foods Health Boon or Quackery?

The potential for enhancing foods with ingredients that can prevent disease is enormous. But some functional foods fail to provide genuine health benefits and some may even pose safety problems. New product lines make misleading claims and many of these products contain herbal medicines, which the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not consider to be safe for use in foods. There is no regulatory category for “functional foods” under U. S. law, and the marketing of such products has presented the FDA with a multitude of controversial regulatory issues. The FDA should address these problems by first pro…