Potential functional food ingredients: Insufficient ingredient descriptions

Abstract

• Accurate identification of functional ingredients is critical for ensuring safety. • Very few publications adequately identify plant sources of functional ingredients. • Research on functional ingredients does not consider batch to batch variability. The ability to show that a potential functional food ingredient has a reproducible health impact and is safe depends on being able to use accurately identified and consistent material in research and commercial production. Further, for functional ingredients derived from plants, it is important to consider the impact of compositional variability introduced by environmental and geographic factors on health and safety. An analysis of over 100 recent papers that reported potential health effects from plant-derived functional ingredients in multiple journals showed that few papers provided sufficient information to allow the research to be replicated or extended and that very few had tested multiple batches of material. This shows that it will be difficult or impossible to use data from these and similar publications to support regulatory acceptance of these ingredients or for the development of commercial products.