Functional food health claims must be supported by sound science.

Alwine Kardinnal, Louise Mennen, and Henk Hendriks share their views on the way scientific evidence for a health claim can be obtained and use weight management to demonstrate different approaches. Weight management products are used to explain the steps that need to be taken to obtain approval for health claims and the way to gather scientific evidence to support new functional food health claim. The latest EU Regulation on Nutrition and Health Claims (NHCR) recognizes different types of claims and different procedures to approve such a claim. The regulators make a distinction between claims referring to reducing disease risk and those referring to physiological or psychological functions, or weight management. The NHCR requires these claims to be supported by scientific evidence, based on human trial data that show effects to be consistent with the claim.