Cross Talk Between Functional Foods and Gut Health

Abstract

The phrase “Let food be the medicine and medicine be the food,” coined by Hippocrates over 2500 years ago is receiving a lot of interest today as food scientists and consumers realize the many health benefits of certain foods. Lately, consumer's choice in food consumption has improved considerably due to the acknowledgment of the fact that foods influence the overall human health. There has been a growing interest over the years to explore beneficial gut microbiota and different interventions are devised to modulate the microbiota through the use of probiotics, prebiotics and synbiotics. Besides improving intestinal health, functional food ingredients also have the potential to restore the gut homeostasis during intestinal disorders conditions. The human gut has a marked effect on the nutritional and health status of the host due to the presence of diverse bacterial species, which develop important metabolic and immune functions. This makes intestinal microbiota a target for nutritional and therapeutic interventions and a factor which influence the biological activity of other food compounds .This chapter attempts to highlight how the reciprocal interactions take place between the gut microbiota and functional food components and how these interactions affect human health and manage various metabolic disorders.