‘Functional Foods’ Give Farmers New Chances

March 16, 2000

Designing crops that could be used as medicine should be an exciting concept for farmers, says University of Virginia researcher Michael Timko. A "much higher" return is in store for a carrot grown for an edible vaccine than one grown for normal consumption, he says.

"The idea to generate edible vaccines probably arose ut of some of the earlier work where people were engineering plants to be resistant to diseases or insects," he said. "If it works against a bacteria or fungus or an insect pest, we should be able to do it against a human pathogen, too."

Clare Hasler, executive director of the Functional Foods for Health Program at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, defines functional foods as "any food or food ingredient that can provide a health benefit beyond basic nutrition."

Researchers want to do more than add ingredients to food, Hasler said. She said part of the functional food effort is to increase the nutritional value of food naturally as in research now being done on fruits and vegetables.

"Some of the carotenoids in corn that provide its yellow color may be associated with reduced risk of cataracts. There's research that has enable tomatoes to have higher amounts of lycopene, which is a cancer risk reduction agent," she explained. "There is also research being done to enhance the cancer-preventive properties of broccoli."

University of Virginia researcher Barbara Mann wants to develop fruits and vegetables containing a vaccine to prevent a disease called amebiasis, caused by a parasite and that leads to the deaths of 70,000 people worldwide.

"An edible vaccine for a developing country is particularly nice, because it is easy to administer," Mann said. "It has the potential to be stored for long periods of time."