Functional food and diabetes: a natural way in diabetes prevention?

Abstract

Diabetes shows a wide range of variation in prevalence around the world and it is expected to affect 300 million by the year 2025. In a prevention framework where banning policies and educational strategies lead the interventions, functional foods (FFs) with their specific health effects could, in the future, indicate a new mode of thinking about the relationships between food and health in everyday life. Functional ingredients, such as stevioside, cinnamon, bitter melon, garlic and onion, ginseng, Gymnema sylvestre and fenugreek, have been addressed for their specific actions towards different reactions involved in diabetes development. New strategies involving the use of FF should be validated through large-scale population trials, considering validated surrogate end points to evaluate the effect of FF in prevention of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Keywords::

• diabetes
• prevention
• functional food
• stevioside
• cinnamon

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Luigi Bubacco for his valuable comments and suggestions, and Prof. Dario Gregori and Prof. George Halpern for the opportunity given to present this work. FRI, Food Research and Innovation is a spin off co-participated by the University of Padova, Italy.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.