The Relationship between Some of Functional Foods and Risk of Chronic Diseases

Following reduction of infectious diseases; unfavorable lifestyle habits especially dietary changes and inactivity has increased the risk of non-communicable chronic diseases. These problems include diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers and osteoporosis. Dietary intake plays an important role both in the development and management of chronic disease. Therefore, investigations have focused toward the identification of functional foods such as soy products, nuts, coffee and green tea. This paper will review the relationship between some of functional food consumption and risk of chronic diseases Pubmed search engine, National Library of Medicine (NLM), Ovid, Elsevier Databases were used to access the relevant articles and functional foods, obesity, central obesity (adiposity), chronic disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, soy (protein), tea, coffee and nuts which were limited to title and abstracts were used as keywords. According to the current results, functional foods incorporating as a part of healthy and balanced diet could influence weight maintenance and significant weight reduction, blood lipid improvement and glycemic control. These kinds of foods may be helpful in chronic diseases prevention. Functional foods exert their beneficial effects on lipid profile, glycemic control and inflammation especially when they incorporated into a healthy dietary pattern like adherence to DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet or Mediterranean style diet. These foods may be helpful in the prevention and management of chronic diseases through improvement in lipid profile, glycemic control and weight maintenance.