Introduction of Health Food

Hi, I am Professor Huang, Shih-Yi from School of Nutrition and Health Sciences in Taipei Medical University. I am glad to have the opportunity to talk about dietary supplement food today. It is also called dietary or nutritional supplements. In Chinese history, the development of dietary supplement can be traced back to thousands years ago. We can find the historical record to know about this. From these records, there are some differences between eastern and western culture in dietary supplement. For example, the earliest record of using Chinese medicine can be traced back to the Western Zhou Dynasty Western Zhou Dynasty is around 1000 B.C. In Western Culture, around 400 B.C. Hippocrates, the Greek founder of western medicine, had a famous quote.

“Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.” At this, we realize that dietary supplement has been used and developed in our history. From earlier medicine record, we can see that the origin of dietary supplements is from plants and herbs.

In Sirach 38:4 “The Lord created medicines from the earth and a sensible man will not despise them.” So, Let’s take some time to explore how dietary supplements come from plants and herbs. Many cases show that dietary supplement extracts from plants and herbs. So I will give you some examples later. First, we will brief through the course outline. Before we start, we have to understand the function of food. A functional food is a food claimed to have an additional function. It often related to health-promotion or disease prevention by adding new ingredients or more of existing ingredients Then, I will introduce the classification of dietary supplements, and the definition of functional food. This definition is rather strict in the past 20 years.

Clinical experiments is required for proving food as functional food. Functional food requires certain conditions such as relieve discomfort or certain symptoms. As a result, the management of functional food becomes important. We will introduce you regulation of dietary supplements from Taiwan government. Most learners are curious about the composition of dietary supplements. So, we will have some time to introduce them. Finally, we will talk about the prospect on dietary supplements.