Functional foods: between new consumption trens and renewed perceptions of health

In postmodern society there has been a great spread of the collective aspiration for a long life lived in perfect physical and mental shape in order to improve the functionality, efficiency and performance of our body and therefore, for the attainment of general wellness. The new trend towards individualism and the greater attention paid to the body move the concept of health from an exclusively medical dimension to the world of daily consumption. Because of these changes, today we tend to give more importance to the relationship between food and its beneficial features. Therefore, in the present time, people are increasingly looking for foods that offer preventive or even therapeutic applications, as well as being nutritious. The science of nutrition continues to impart important knowledge for helping people to work out a suitable diet according to various physiological conditions, so that a good level of health in the population at large can be maintained. For this reason, many nutritionists and dieticians argue that it would not be necessary to develop foods for specific health use, because they consider it sufficient to utilize traditional foods, on condition that they are appropriately combined and consumed as part of a balanced diet. The development of functional foods as a method of prevention permeating contemporary society can be interpreted as the materialization of the new principles that revolve around the current concept of health. Furthermore, functional foods represent a source of information about our society, because they describe features of our material culture shedding light on new aspects of health and wellness perceptions. In particular, functional foods, compared with medicines, besides being a consequence of social changes, are inexorably bringing the world of medicines closer to that of daily consumption.