Multinational food firms struggle to meet health claims across the globe

Dr Ivana Jankovic, manager for the probiotic pipeline at Nestlé Research in Switzerland, said the requirements for Japan, for example, were quite different from those in the EU and this made it difficult to develop new functional foods that meet the requirements of all regions.

Despite 800-plus human intervention studies, which have provided evidence for the efficacy of probiotics over the years, no probiotics health claim submissions to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have yet been successful. For example, Dr Sofia Forssten, from Danisco Health and Nutrition in Finland, highlighted probiotics' ability to aid gut health: "Gastrointestinal microbiota is crucial for development of immunity in infants and also old people."

According to Leatherhead Food Research's head of regulatory services, Dr Mary Gilsenan, some 1,000 health claims have been assessed by EFSA, but the majority were not deemed to be scientifically substantiated. Several probiotic, antioxidant and satiety claims were among these.

"For big players such as Nestlé, it is extremely difficult to satisfy all regulations at once," said Jankovic. "It is not a question of science."

One of the biggest problems, Jankovic reported, was providing proof of efficacy for health claims on products among an ostensibly healthy population. Unlike pharmaceuticals, which are targeted at the sick, with functional foods, depended on demonstrating benefits to long-term health. For this reason, she said research should focus on the development and validation of biomarkers of health and diseases, the design of functional assays with predictive value, and the identification of bioactive molecules in probiotic products, while ensuring their safety.