Eastern promise

When a food that smells, and for the uninitiated, tastes, like old socks, suddenly vanished from shop shelves in Japan recently, it highlighted the country's unique relationship with functional foods and its never-ending food fads. The food - a pungent dish of fermented soybeans called natto - and supplements derived from it, flew off the shelves when new health claims for this traditional foodstuff were made on a popular TV programme. Claims, however, that later turned out to be untrue.

But the Japanese public's impulsive behaviour and the ease with which the media can deceive its audience underlines why Japan is so keen on functional foods - the Japanese simply trust the media more than their counterparts in the West do.

"Negative media attention of course affects sales," says Japanese functional food market expert Paul Yamaguchi. "But they soon bounce back."

Bad publicity is soon forgotten in Japan and consumers easily fall for the next fad. News of the TV deceit was damaging, there is no doubt of that, but an insatiable appetite for the new, for convenience and health, plus a mania for dieting, means that such foods do not remain in the shadows for very long.

With big food manufacturers maintaining some would say unhealthily close ties to TV stations and media advertising departments, the media is under great pressure to find the next big silver bullet food that will bring in audiences, food advertising revenue and happy sponsors.

An Osaka-based TV company's Hakkutsu! Aru Aru Daijiten II (Encyclopedia of Living) was no different in this respect when it revealed that those pungent sticky brown fermented natto soy beans would help people lose weight and that extracts taken as pills would prevent ageing according to its guest American researcher. Natto product producers sponsored the show.

It now appears the show totally misrepresented the American's findings on natto by mistranslating his words to produce the miraculous claims. As a result, the world's largest market for functional foods took a knock.

But serious doubts about some of Japan's health food claims, unlike an equivalent backlash in the West, has set back natto sales only a little and done nothing to shake belief in other 'magic' foods. Nor will it stop the industry from churning out hundreds of new ones every year.

Says author of an authoritative guide to Japan's functional food business for market researcher Mintel, David Jago: "I think Japan is seen as the hub of activity simply because it rates novelty so highly, doesn't test-market, and launches huge numbers of short-lived products. Many are little more than fashionable novelties, even in Japan."

Not surprising then that the more fanciful functional foods first took off in Japan and that its consumers kick-started the whole functional foods industry. With its history of health consciousness