More than 2000 years ago, Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine.” This concept underlies the definition of “functional foods” used by the International Food Information Council (IFIC): any food or food component that may provide a health benefit beyond basic nutrition.
IFIC is keeping a finger on the pulse of consumer attitudes toward functional foods with its most recent quantitative survey, conducted in March 2002. Cogent Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts, conducted telephone surveys with 1,004 randomly selected U.S. adults. Those surveys provided data that build on the quantitative data collected in 1998 and 2000.
