In my review, I dive deeper into both functional and fortified foods .
Functional foods are foods in which ingredients with an additional health value have been added to foods. Functional foods were first described in the 1980s in Japan, where there is a government approval process for functional foods called Foods for Specified Health Use (FOSHU), something I hope to discuss in part 3.
Fortified foods have nutrients like vitamins and minerals added to them that do not naturally occur in the food or maybe lost during production. The concept of these foods is to improve nutrition and be beneficial to the health of those who consume them. A very common example seen in Irish supermarkets is milk which is often fortified with vitamin D.
Both of these foods are said to be cost-effect, sustainable approaches to minimising the risk of health problems such as diabetes , iron deficiency, cholesterol, and many other global health problems.
However, each country deals with these foods differently, with legislations and regulations differing around the world (will be discussed in part 3 )