HCM CITY — Functional foods including increasingly popular food supplements can help fight serious diseases in both developed and developing countries, experts said at a two-day conference that ended in HCM City yesterday.
Food scientists, however, also stressed the need to ensure that the ingredients and processes applied meet "global sound scientific standards" for food safety.
Dr Mary Schmidl, adjunct professor of the International Union of Food Science and Technology (IUFoST) Scientific Council Chair, mentioned the need for making smaller portions of all foods, including functional foods.
She said long term safety studies and ‘in market surveillance" were necessary, especially for new highly enriched or fortified foods.
While functional foods can help tackle food safety, hunger and obesity, she said companies making them need to have sound scientific evidence to back up their claims about benefits provided by their products.
"False claims give false hopes to desperate people and, in the worst case, delay necessary treatment," she said. She said functional foods must not distract people from adopting a healthy diet.
The most recent trend in food innovation and development is the use of novel or traditional functional ingredients, said Ser-Low Wai Ming, president of Singapore's Institute of Food Science & Technology (SIFST), a professional society of food scientists, food technologists, chemists, biochemists, microbiologists, engineers, educators and other technical personnel.
Safety innovations
Safe, quality and healthy food is the requirement of the day, said Prakash, director of India's Central Food Technological Research Institute.
"Hence, agro-based raw materials need to be added to nutrition," he said.
This can be achieved through empowering rural and semi urban spheres with adaptable food technologies through micro, tiny, cottage and women entrepreneurship, he said.
The driving force of this process would be "cascading small, medium, large and global food industries," he added.
Prakash said the farming system, agro-industry and technologies of identification, verification, refinement and transfer are requirements for enhancing food safety, as well as nutritional and food security.
Besides, the food safety system must have four key attributes to achieve its objectives: prevention, accountability, integration in the chain, and risk assessment, he said.
To deliver safe food with zero contamination of pesticides, zero contamination of heavy metals, absence of toxins and no pathogens is not an easy task, Prakash said.
Do Thi Lan Nhi, training manager at the Viet Nam Administration of Food Science and Technology (VAFoST) said there were food safety concerns about many popular food items in the country, including the nation's most popular dish, Pho (rice noodle soup with beef or chicken), fish sauce and coffee.
The ingredients used in preparing these dishes by small, family based businesses were not easy to keep track of, she said. The chili sauce made by family-run workshop, for instance, carried no labels and could use hazardous biological and chemical substances, she said.
The conference, billed as the "first international symposium in food science and the technology" was co-organised by the IUFoST and the VAFoST. — VNS
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