Eating for Health and Wellness
There is a significant market for health-based food products that cater to specialist needs, in supermarkets, retail food shops, cafes, restaurants, and pre-packaged or ready-made meals. This market may be divided into various categories, for instance:
🍇 Medical and health
🍉 Lifestyle and principles
🍒 Cultural or religion
Yet all three categories contribute to the same general need for specialty food products.
Specialised Diets for Medical and Health Reasons
Common dietary adjustments for medical needs include diets that are:
🥑 Gluten free – Gluten occurs at high levels in wheat grain. It occurs in many processed foods, not only baked goods. Many people do not digest gluten very readily. Diets free of the gluten protein found in wheat products are necessary for living with coeliac disease and some other conditions.
🥑 Dairy free – free of all dairy products, include added lactose, casein, and whey, as an adjustment to allergy or sensitivity.
🥑 Egg free – free of egg products (primarily chicken, but all other eggs as well), including added albumin, usually as an adjustment to allergy.
🥑 FODMAP – This diet was developed at Monash University, Australia, and considers how fast and easily different foods digest. It adjusts for certain compounds to help treat diseases and disorders of the gut, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS); research into low FODMAP diets for treating other conditions is under exploration.
🥑 Sensitivities – Different people react differently to different foods. Excessive use of any one food type may be a factor in developing a sensitivity to that food. There can be other factors as well – genetics, environment etc) Some people can become sensitive to soy, coconut, certain vegetables, nuts, and other foods which might be healthy choices for the majority. It is wise to consider variety in the ingredients you use in different products. e.g., don’t produce everything with soy in it, or nuts, or anything else.
🥑 Low salt diets for helping keep blood pressure low and maintain cardiac health.
🥑 Diabetic diets focused on low sugar intake.
Perhaps one of the most well-known medical adjustment for diet is a gluten-free diet due to coeliac disease.
Coeliac disease (CD) is an autoimmune disease that affects the small intestine, whereby gluten ingestion leads to the destruction of enterocytic villi.
Affected patients may experience a broad variety of gastrointestinal and malabsorption symptoms.
A gluten-free diet is the only available treatment, abstaining from gluten-free diet products that contain gluten such as wheat, barley, rye, and foods that are derivatives of grains (e.g., semolina, durum, spelt, triticale, and malt).
Learn about special diets - from gluten-free to halal and plant-based - and how health, lifestyle, and culture influence food choices and learn about how to get involved in health food production.
Study subjects include:
Nutrition for Health (Human Nutrition III)
Contact us if you'd like to know more and can't find answers on the website! We'd love to chat.
