Foods in general provide us either taste/convenience benefits or nutrition/enhancement utility. Food habits in several traditionally established cultures world over were largely dictated by the need for nutrition and energy. Fruits, leaves and other plant parts were essential components of diet in these societies and apart from being an energy source, food thus also included consumption of a variety of plant secondary chemicals. These compounds were not only a part of dietary ecology, but may have become essential to physiological homeostasis.

Today it is being understood that organic molecules in the diet could be determinants of human gut morphology and without the inhibitory effects of various allelochemicals on rates of carbohydrate digestion, the human small intestine might not need to be as long as it currently is. Much later in the course of human evolution cooking and other processing techniques, guided by taste as a predominant determinant in food choices, largely decreased the ingestion of plant secondary compounds in the diet. Until recently few of the studies linking diet and disease considered ingested phytochemicals as positive agents in disease prevention.

Recognition that chronic diseases of industrial societies have a dietary basis has led to recommendations to reduce dietary fat and increase consumption of fibre, anti-oxidant vitamins and complex carbohydrates. This is diet higher in plant material and consequently closer to diets of traditional societies. The actions of plant secondary compounds in mediating lipid and carbohydrate metabolism suggest that physiological homeostasis could include both plant non-nutrients and fats in higher levels than currently recommended. Growing evidence for the role of non-nutrients such as those with anti-cholesterolemic activity, anti-oxidants and those mediating carbohydrate metabolism in physiological processes should be accessed not simply from a clinical perspective, but in relation to disease prevention.

Functional foods are viewed differently from the eastern and western perspectives. They are considered revolutionary and represent a rapidly growing segment of the food industry in the west. There is tight competition between the food and pharmaceutical companies to bring functional foods to the mass market. In the east on the other hand, functional foods have been a part of its culture for centuries. Ayurvedic and Siddha systems of medicine in India recognized the crucial role of food towards health maintenance as early as 10,000 B.C.E. From ancient times Indians and the Chinese have used foods for both preventive and therapeutic benefits, a view that is being currently recognized around the world. The current huge market for functional foods is dictated by economic benefits, as they give higher profitability margin compared to conventional foods. Developing countries have started to emerge as exporters to cater to increasing demand in the developed countries. Moreover demand for the modern functional foods is also growing in developing countries thanks to enhanced disease burden due to massive westernization and forgotten traditional food habits. This growing market presents a lucrative opportunity to develop domestic markets.

In India apart from CFTRI (Mysore) and NDRI (Karnal) not many public sector organizations are working on the R&D of functional foods. Functional food market in India is still in its infancy, but the demand for functional foods will continue to increase due to their specific health benefits. The government is therefore planning to invest US $21.5 billion in food processing industry in the next five years. Functional foods already available in the Indian market are largely copies of western food products. Instead of trying to copy these, more extensive study on traditional diets in various parts of the country will reintroduce time-tested healthy food items in our daily diet. Further modifications on these traditional foods in terms of enrichment with added botanicals or minerals will take care of problems of competition from traditional foods, patentability etc.