Functional food ingredient quality: Opportunities to improve public health by compendial standardization

Functional food ingredients often include well-characterized dietary supplement ingredients, and are expected to deliver corroborated structure/function declarations and may support health claims. A compendial monograph for a functional food ingredient, as exemplified in the Food Chemicals Codex (FCC), is vetted and made official by elected volunteer experts in the Food Ingredients Expert Committee of the Council of Experts of the United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP). As a result, manufacturers and other stakeholders can use these public standards to conduct tests that assure the quality of functional foods and food ingredients in commerce. FCC monographs complement adherence to current good manufacturing practices for foods and dietary supplements, and provide minimum quality standards during safety and exposure evaluation. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.