Research

Functional foods in genomic medicine: a review of fermented papaya preparation research progress

FILE2012

Category OthersReview paper

1 Francesco Marotta, 2Roberto Catanzaro, 3Hariom Yadav, 3Shalini Jain, 1Claudio Tomella, 1Ascanio Polimeni, 4Pierre Mantello.

(1) ReGenera Research Group, Milano, Italy
(2) Gastroenterology Unit, Dept. of Internal Medicine, University of Catania, Italy
(3) NIDDK, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, USA
(4) Osato Research Institute and Bioscience Lab, Gifu, Japan

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"Functional Foods" represent an emerging opportunity and they will certainly play a consistent and important role in future too. Such a new perspective entirely depends on the growing attention paid by nutritionists to the development of new innovating solutions aiming at acting on organic systems as well as on more general topics relating to consumer good health conditions. Differently from the past, when mainly retrospective epidemiological studies or empirical experiences were carried out on single nutrients, such a new and growing interest by the scientific community follows research deeply oriented to clinics supplemented by an accurate study on nutrients, genomics and single nutritional requirement diagnostics. Already in 1993, the leading journal Nature published a report "Japan is exploring limits between food and medicine" (Swinbanks 1993). Clearly the success of "Functional Foods" depends on the food industry capacity too of developing new effective products which on the one side meet any consumer request and on the other must be have positive effects on health, supported and validated by scientific research and therefore far beyond simple positive properties, as recently underlined in a meeting, organised by a no profit non governmental international association.
FPP is a natural food that has been scientifically proven to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immune activation, and wound healing effects through numerous clinical studies and certainly represents a Functional Food highly compliant with the novel features of the new nutrigenomic-driven action plan strategy aimed to disease risk reduction and successful integration with- in specific pharmacological treatments.

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