Functional foods, fortified foods. They sound good for you, but they may actually be

sabotaging your healthy diet. In this episode, we talk with one psychologist who studies how companies market foods to

health conscious consumers and why we should all be wary of what they tell us about their

products. Laura Spatari Cornish is a marketing and advertising professor at Coventry University in the United Kingdom.

She studies how foods are marketed to consumers

and how that affects our decisions about what to eat.

Welcome, Dr. Spateri Cornish.

Thank you.

I'm very happy to be here.

First of all, what is a functional food?

Okay, so a functional food basically is any food that has been fortified in some way.

Now, what that means is they have added vitamins or minerals to a food over and above of what it actually is.

It's very, very common.

So if you have corn flakes and it's basically fortified with vitamin A, that is actually a functional food.

Or if you have bread and in the bread they say it's fortified with omega-3, that is actually a functional food. Or if you have bread, and in the bread, they say

it's fortified with omega-3, that is also a functional food. So we find them everywhere on the shelves

in our supermarkets. Would you say that functional foods are actually more of a marketing tool?

Do they influence what people decide to eat based on the fortification of these foods? Yes. I want to just take you a step

back and say that actually most foods are marketing tools. So ever since industrialization has

happened and foods have been processed, marketers have done a lot of research into our taste,

into our desires of food. So, you know, they use a lot of processes to give

us the foods we actually love. That's why sometimes we can't stop eating. And on top of that,

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