Theme D: Healthy products
- Former user (Deleted)
- Paulien Vredendaal, van
What are healthy products?
This is a broad theme in which the focus is on a specific content with a more or less proven health effect. For instance, you can think of cresses containing a high concentration of ingredients. Functional nutrition is another example, such as probiotics for your intestines and healthy dairy-egg drinks. In addition, there are consumer groups who want the so called A2 milk because of expected health effects.
Personalized food is the new healthy. Everyone is different and no diet works the same for everyone. Thanks to all kinds of technological developments, personalized food is getting more and more attention: customized food tailored to a specific target group or even to one specific individual. Based on age, sex, allergies, lifestyle, preferences and other aspects such as susceptibility to diseases, a personal menu is designed, sometimes enriched with additives such as microbiotics and additional vitamins.
Why healthy products?
Health is one of the greatest societal challenges. Nutrition can make people stay healthy for longer. There are thousands of substances in plants which can promote the health of people. If researchers know which varieties contain a lot of a particular substance, breeders can develop new varieties that contain even more of these good ingredients. In the end, they can contribute to food that helps people stay healthy for longer.
The starting point of Personalized Food is that every person is different and benefits from food that suits him or her. ‘Suited’ means that it supports or enhances the health needs of an individual, depending on one's constitution, condition, life stage and lifestyle. Food can be used to help people recover faster from illness, or to eat as healthy as possible during their illness. If the food contains additional ingredients that can be used by a patient to recover faster, researchers believe that it is profitable.
What does it look like in practice and / or what are examples of companies?
Innovative initiatives in this category in which companies are actively engaged in engineering the content of their products
Who are the main initiators?
The research community, the medical world and organizations of patients.
For further reading:
http://www.personalisednutritionandhealth.com
Go to Theme E: Customized Food
or go back to Theme C: Local Food