Essay On Functional Foods

1. INTRODUCTION

Almost before 2500 years ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates stated that “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”, this expression is triggering the interest of consumers and nutritionists toward food again, thus the prevailing belief about ‘food’ is that it is just consumed to meet the body requirements and satisfaction and certainly to dumb the sounds of hunger, but nowadays the consumers come to be more educated about the importance of food for health improvement and disease prevention, and are constantly interesting and oriented to ‘balanced diet’, ‘functional foods’ and ‘optimal nutrition’.

1.1. Functional Foods

‘Functional foods’ is a recent field that has been generated at the end of the last century as consequence of numerous researches have proved that food in addition to the basic nutritional content, it includes a lot of phytochemicals (nutraceuticals) that have been documented to play an integral role in illness therapy (El Sohaimy, 2012).

1.1.1. The Concept of Functional Foods

There is no one universal definition that can be express the term ‘functional

Practically, functional foods should be adhered to the therapy regimen of cancer and chronic illnesses as (cardiovascular diseases (CVD), diabetes mellitus, obesity, etc.); however, many reports have documented the relation between natural food using up and reduction the risk of diseases i.e. vegetables, fruits and grains are considered as a prime source of flavonoids, phenolics, phytosterols, terpenes, fibers, minerals and vitamins play an important role as defense against CVD (Ortega et al., 2006), and coronory artery diseases (Kushi et al., 1995), as well their antioxidants activity (Ziegler,