ILC-UK issues functional call to arms for older people
Senior ILC-UK researcher Rebecca Taylor authored the study ‘Older people and functional foods’, which accepts that a healthy diet incorporating functional foods can prevent chronic disease in older people, but calls for further attention to their specific nutritional needs and attitudes to such foodstuffs.
Taylor told NutraIngredients.com that the problem wasn’t the accepted efficacy of given functional foods – to maintain bone, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal health – which she insists should supplement a healthy diet rather than be seen as a ‘cure all’, but in examining whether older people consume them regularly.
She said: “There are lots of trials showing that if you consume 2g of plant sterols or stanols then cholesterol will fall by ‘X’ per cent. But there isn’t much on checking wider compliance, given that randomised clinical trials are always controlled.”
Do doctors think functional?
Accordingly, Taylor said that doctors and other healthcare professionals had a major role to play in functional food uptake amongst older people: “Very little research has been done to see what healthcare professionals think of functional foods, and whether they recommend them.”
“I did a PubMed search around ‘healthcare professional and functional foods’, along with other permutations, and found only 12 articles. It would be an interesting area to survey, because older people are more likely to follow nutritional advice from a GP.”
One interesting aspect of the ILC-UK’s report was its attention to age-dependent dietary requirements and suggestion that governments produce RDA guidelines based upon different age groups amogst older people. For instance, it states that within the 60+ age group (and for post-menopausal women in particular) Vitamin D is vital to bone health.
Taylor said that national nutrition recommendations were key to uptake where “functional foods could clearly play a role” given “a surge of interest in Vitamin D” over the past year. She added that the US Institute of Medicine moved to raise its RDA to 25mcg in 2005, while the UK persists with a 1992 COMA recommendation of just 10mcg, which she suggests is too low.
Taylor said that socio-economic factors were also inconclusive, with research concluding that higher and lower-income groups were both more likely to buy functional foods, although “many studies show that functional food consumers are more likely to be older and female”.
Unsurprisingly, Taylor said the key purchase driver remained taste, which remains a key challenge for functional food manufacturers. “If people hate the taste, they don’t care about the health benefits”.
Negative image?
Taylor agreed that scepticism in some quarters as regards the effectiveness of functional foods was unfortunate, given science suggesting specific products work well. One example she cited was the use of cholesterol-lowering margarine instead of statins (when the latter are used in low doses), which obviously cuts out the need for drug interventions.
Ironically though, the ILC-UK’s report does mention differing perceptions of functional foods throughout the EU that suggest functional foods have an image problem in some countries and are somehow seen as unnatural.
Taylor wrote: “Technology loving Finns are more receptive to functional foods than natural food-oriented Danes, and English consumers see functional foods as a way to help achieve healthy eating, while Swedes consider them to be a substitute for people who do not have healthy diets.”
She added said that probiotic treatment protocols for older people should be examined further given the “strongest evidence of their health benefits” in treating those at risk of Antibiotic Associated Diarrhea, but was unable to comment on the wider challenge of communicating probiotic benefits, given EFSA’s recent negative opinions.
