A. Overview:
Functional food Therapeutic Lifestyle Change Intervention Program is step by
step complementary and Integrated Medicine procedure which includes:
Step 1. Find out the cause of disease: for example causes for prostatitis, causes for
constipation.
Step 2.choose the right functional foods recipe per patient’s especial health situation
Step 3. Designed to
provide patients with the support,
knowledge, skills and understanding to enable them to identify and overcome the
different challenges faced in the adoption and maintenance of a healthy diet
and physically active lifestyle.
B. Functional Foods do have a amazing capability at health
improvement.
During the first 50 years of the 20th century, scientific
focus was on the identification of essential elements, particularly vitamins,
and their role in the prevention of various dietary deficiency diseases. This
emphasis on nutrient deficiencies or “undernutrition” shifted dramatically,
however, during the 1970s when diseases linked to excess and “overnutrition”
became a major public health concern. Thus began a flurry of public health
guidelines, including the Senate Select (McGovern) Committee’s Dietary Goals
for the United States (1977), the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (1980, 1985,
1990, 1996, 2000— a joint publication of the USDA and the Department of Health
and Human Services), the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health
(1988), the National Research Council’s Diet and Health (1989) and Healthy
People 2000 and 2010 from the U.S. Public Health Service. All of these reports
are aimed at public policy and education emphasizing the importance of
consuming a diet that is low in saturated fat, and high in vegetables, fruits,
whole grains and legumes to reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as heart
disease, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and stroke.
Scientists also began to identify physiologically active
components in foods from both plants and animals (known as phytochemicals and
zoochemicals, respectively) that potentially could reduce risk for a variety of
chronic diseases. These events, coupled with an aging, health-conscious
population, changes in food regulations, numerous technological advances and a
marketplace ripe for the introduction of health-promoting products, coalesced
in the 1990s to create the trend we now know as “functional foods.” This report
includes a discussion of how functional foods are currently defined, the
strength of the evidence both required and thus far provided for many of these
products, safety considerations in using some of these products, factors
driving the functional foods phenomenon, and finally, what the future may hold
for this new food category.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services,
diet plays a role in 5 of 10 of the leading causes of death, including coronary
heart disease (CHD), certain types of cancer, stroke, diabetes (noninsulin
dependent or type 2) and atherosclerosis. The dietary pattern that has been
linked with these major causes of death in the United States and other
developed countries is characterized as relatively high in total and saturated
fat, cholesterol, sodium and refined sugars and relatively low in unsaturated
fat, grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables. An accumulating body of research
now suggests that consumption of certain foods or their associated
physiologically active components may be linked to disease risk reduction (6).
The great majority of these components derive from plants; however, there are
several classes of physiologically active functional food ingredients of animal
or microbial origin.
Refer: European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2002) 56,
Suppl 3, S29-S33. doi:10.1038/sj.ejcn.1601481
C. lifestyle practices has a more massive influence to our
health:
"A very short list of lifestyle practices has a more
massive influence on our medical destinies than anything else in all of
medicine," says Dr David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention
Research Center and president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, in
a telephone interview. "There's almost nothing in all of medicine that has
the vast, consistent, and diverse evidence base."
He remarked that there is no pill, and there never will be
any pill, that can reduce the burden of chronic disease in the way that healthy
lifestyle factors can.
So why don't we use lifestyle factors more?
Refer: http://www.medscape.com/
