Functional Foods On The Hot Seat
It sounds like something to get excited about.
Functional foods have added ingredients to boost your immunity or improve your health or quality of life.
There are margarines and even a new pizza to lower cholesterol, yogurts to improve digestion, and soft drinks and bottled water to energize you, give you more vitamins, or even help you to lose weight.
Here’s the problem…
No one knows what the long-term effects of these functional foods are. Researchers warn that they could cause unexpected side effects.
There’s a particular concern about how these foods may interact with medicines you’re taking.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, Nynke de Jong and colleagues from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands focused on the potential risks of cholesterol-lowering functional foods.
They’re concerned that most people who eat cholesterol-lowering margarine and similar types of food already know they have high cholesterol.
So these people are more likely to be treating their condition with statins, which are prescription drugs designed to reduce cholesterol.
The phytosterols and stanols in the functional foods may interact badly with these statins and form fatty deposits in your arteries. Which is exactly what you don’t want.
So before you eat any functional foods for your health, check with your doctor. Especially if you take any medications.
You don’t want to accidentally hurt yourself by eating healthy.
Technorati Tags: functional foods, cholesterol, diet food, statins
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Don’t like the idea of functional foods. Just make it natural.
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:19 pm
These kinds of foods almost sound like drugs or vitamins at least.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:09 pm
There are some natural foods that bring down cholesterol and no one badmouths those, so what’s the difference here? I just don’t like the taste of most of that functional stuff.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
I don’t like the idea of my food having side effects.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Eating right will boost your immunity. You don’t need functional foods for that.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:31 pm
When Tammi said these foods sound like drugs, it got me to thinking that they should test them like drugs, too, and make sure there aren’t any bad side effects from eating them for a long time.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:47 pm
The researchers are making a good argument when they say that people who pick up functional foods to lower their cholesterol probably already know they have high cholesterol and could be treating it already with drugs. If functional foods put people like that at risk (but they’d have to prove that first) then the foods should come with a warning or something like that.
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
If it tastes good, I’ll eat it.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:10 pm
I like natural foods cuz they taste better and you don’t have to worry about what they’ll do to you.