SUMMARY

The so-called functional foods, as one of those elements in pursue of keeping or improving the health through dieting, are framed within the new concept of the Optimal Nutrition that embraces, apart from covering the dietary needs, the role of food on decreasing the incidence of the so-called “illnesses of civilization” or the overfeeding.
Up to this moment, there is no legal description for functional foods, but a wide consensus to conceptualize them as products containing active biological compounds, capable of having beneficial effects over one or more organic functions, that mean a health improvement or a decrease in the risk of suffering certain illnesses. Differing from Japan, country that gave birth to functional foods, in Europe the concept is not related to the fact of modifying the product to make it more healthy, but can also be applied to natural foods, ever since they contain a proper amount of compounds with healthy effects.
The valuing of functional food products can be made by means of need, safety and effectiveness. The three terms are important and, through the article, some hesitations and reflections are made regarding them. Perhaps, the most difficult is posed when it comes to its need, since it is supposed that there is nothing in these kinds of products not to be found in conventional ones. That is, it is generally accepted that a proper diet can provide the benefits that are supposed to carry the functional ones, so that taking good feed habits would be enough to decrease the incidence of chronic illnesses associated or related to overfeeding.
Notwithstanding, it is a fact that the success derived from several years insisting on the need of changing the current feeding tips, by reducing, for instance, the intake of animal derived products and increasing that of vegetables, has been more than arguable and the prevalence of these illnesses goes on increasing. Facing this situation, it does not seem logical to despise whatever the possible help, as small as it can be, and the functional foods might find here its true role and justification.
The increasing presence of products that are given a boost within the market, on grounds of providing an added value in health terms, is an unarguable fact as well as that in some cases the information provided is biased or exaggerated and in others straight false, or at least, not scientifically contrasted. A certain legal gap till last year (2007) has favored the spread of products, most of them within the field of food and more over in the complex world of dietary supplements that praise themselves to have prone to miraculous properties. This situation was in need of a regulation and harmonization regarding what can be said and how, and this is precisely the aim of the Regulation 1924/2006, related to nutritional and healthy properties claims made on foods, that has come into effect within the European Union (July 2007). In this Regulation, the basis to determine which food can be praised to have nutritional and healthy properties, the requirements through which they can be made patent and how, are exposed.
The articulation of the regulations is complex and subject to interpretations that will be refined through consecutive rules, but, in any case, there is no doubt that will help out in the process of putting the troubled world of labeling, presentation and advertising of the food declared to have healthy properties, into order. This new rule introduces several new features, that have been taken a closer look in this article, such as: (a) the description and categorization of the statements that can be made regarding the relations between food products and health, (b) the mandatory fact of counting on a scientific endorsement for every declared statement, (c) the mandatory fact that every statement must be made in terms that can be understood by consumers as a whole and (d) the decision that not every food stuff can come to the point of being claimed to have nutritional or healthy properties, but, in that order, will have to fit a determined nutritional profile.