Warning: may contain guff

There was a time when the only the makers of certain shampoos and moisturisers could get away making absolutely ridiculous claims about their products. In recent years, however, more and more manufacturers have climbed on board the crazy train and now if you take a walk through your local supermarket, you will quickly lose count of the number of foods that promise to keep you alive and gorgeous looking for longer.

There are sugary cereal bars which use extra nutrients and calcium to distract from their calorific content, vegetable spreads that promise to lower your cholesterol in a heart beat and yoghurt drinks with unpronounceable additives which, the ads say, will improve you digestion and immunity. And because these products are even better than real food — as the manufacturers will have you believe — they can justify charging a premium for them. It's a win win situation, for them at any rate.

Last year the increasingly outlandish claims being made on some food labels finally prompted the EU to take action, and legislation was introduced prohibiting manufacturers from making unverifiable health claims about their products. In the future, all nutritional or health claims will have to be backed by proper scientific evidence, although certain products are hanging in there after getting a two-year derogation so they can get their houses in order.

Functional foods, which claim to have beneficial nutrients added, are not entirely without merit, however. Earlier this month Enterprise Ireland announced €20 million in funding for the establishment of a National Functional Foods Research Centre. The new centre will bring together four of the biggest food groups in the country - Dairygold Food Ingredients, Glanbia Nutritionals, Carbery and Kerry Ingredients Ireland - to maximise the commercial value of milk.

The companies will work in conjunction with researchers from UCD, UCC, UL and Teagasc to enhance foods (including infant formula, dairy spreads, yogurts and cheese) with extra nutrients. Speaking at the launch, the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Coughlan said the investment would "lead to the delivery of new high-value, innovative food products for the health conscious consumer".

THE SCIENTISTS WORKING as part of the programme accept that functional foods have been given a bad name by certain manufacturers. "We want to bring a high level of rigour to all of these claims," Gerald Fitzgerald, the professor of food microbiology at UCC and interim CEO of the new centre, said last week. "The broad functional food industry historically has been damaged by the laxity of rigour and clinical verification of the claims made."

Whatever about positive benefits for consumers, the up-side for the food producers is irrefutable, and the appetite for nutraceuticals - as functional foods have been dubbed - appears insatiable. Functional foods now command a market share in Ireland in excess of €100m annually and the market has been growing at a healthy 20 per cent per year. There are now over 1,000 foods carrying health claims in Ireland.

In the US, the rate of growth is even more impressive, and health conscious consumers have trebled their spend on functional foods to $27 billion (€17.3bn) in the last year, according to the Centre for Culinary Development and Packaged Facts. Approximately 450 brain foods and drinks were launched in the US last year alone, and the global market is worth over €60bn each year.

Functional foods were all part of a Brave New World vision of the future outlined in a report commissioned by Bord Bia and published last winter. The report painted a picture of the food world in 2020 in which "on the go" consumers would ingest nutrient capsules and food would be virtually indistinguishable from medicine.

Not everyone is convinced that such a future is desirable. At the vanguard of the anti-functional food brigade is US writer Michael Pollan. Earlier this year he published In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, in which he railed against modern nutritionism and the American paradox which sees people grow less healthy even as they worry more about nutrition.

In the book Pollan warns against food products which make health claims. He believes nutraceuticals confuse people into making the wrong food choices. "It's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section," he writes.

POLLAN IS NOT alone. Food writer John McKenna is firmly in his corner. At a recent Bord Bia presentation McKenna was told in a matter-of-fact fashion by a food expert that the future was all about genetically modified crops and nutraceuticals. "I see the people talking about it and it is just so much snake oil, to be honest. I don't want to decry the whole business of food science but it is the wrong answer to the question. The food health issue is the issue - it is not nutraceuticals. That is simply the wrong answer," he says.

"My kids are of the generation that are threatened with having a shorter lifespan than their parents for the first time in human history. This is because of the terrible impact the western diet is having on our children and yet we are saying the answer lies in obesity pills and nutraceuticals - to me it just doesn't. If you source good, clean food, hopefully as much locally produced food as you can, then that is where the answer lies."

McKenna argues that while certain products may claim to lower your cholesterol, "there are 20 other ways of reducing your cholesterol which don't involve trans fats". He describes Pollan as "an absolute genius. One of the sanest voices in the food writing business."

Another problem with nutraceuticals is not their ineffectiveness but the exact opposite. Many such products contain naturally occurring medications which are derived from plants. They do work but there is little information about the long-term effects of using them, and serious question marks hang over the desirability of self-medication. Using nutraceuticals to self-medicate is entirely unnecessary, according to Pollan, who has simplified the road to better health in seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."