Mindfulness of Functional Foods in Cancer Prevention and Health Promotion: A Comprehensive Review
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Cancer is a major cause of death in the world. Common cancers include prostate cancer, breast cancer, bladder cancer, colorectal cancer, and skin cancers. Treatment of cancer is very expensive hence the need to prevent the condition primarily, or even secondarily. Foods, like chemicals, have cumulative effects and contain substances both essential and non-essential which have been shown to be healthy. Functional foods with intrinsic mixture of bioactive anti-cancer compounds could be very effective medium to contain menace caused by cancer. The health promoting effect of fruits and vegetable is indisputable. The primary role of diet is to provide sufficient nutrients to meet the nutritional requirements of an individual. There is now increasing scientific evidence to support the hypothesis that some foods and food components have beneficial physiological and psychological effects over and above the provision of the basic nutrients. Functional foods can be considered to be those whole, fortified, enriched or enhanced foods that provide health benefits beyond the provision of essential nutrients (e.g., vitamins and minerals), when they are consumed at efficacious levels as part of a varied diet on a regular basis. Linking the consumption of functional foods or food ingredients with health claims should be based on sound scientific evidence, with the “gold standard”. However, not all foods on the market today that are claimed to be functional foods are supported by enough solid data to merit such claims. This review categorizes a variety of functional foods according to the type of evidence supporting their functionality, the strength of that evidence, the recommended intakes and their role in cancer prevention.
Author: Suman Bala
Institution: Kurukshetra University
Language: English
Topic: Nutritional Studies and Diet
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4402371969