Dr John Monro at the New Zealand Institute for Crop and Food Research suggests that virtual food components (VFCs) on labels would better evaluate the real physiological effects of food consumed.
VFCs are nutrient-like values that allow food data to say not only what a food is, but also what it does, and how well it does it.
"In a world flooded by functional foods, there is a real need for values that can represent food effects that can not be shown in traditional panels," says Monro.
His new concept could grow in popularity on the back of health, on of the top ten consumer 'mega-trends' in new product design for 2005.
Market analysts Datamonitor claimed last month that the numbers of functional food consumers in major European markets are growing each year by around 6-7 per cent.
French consumers alone spent €360 million on functional foods and drinks in 2002, with Datamonitor forecasting spending to rise by 40 per cent to €506 million in 2007.
He believes that 'important though nutrient values are' they can be 'hopelessly inadequate for communicating the benefits of foods.'
Like traditional nutritional information, VFCs are presented as weights. They provide information about the functional efficiency of a food, by comparing the effect of that food with a suitable reference material of known activity.
Monro's first VFC - glycaemic glucose equivalent (GGE) - is a measure of the glucose-raising potential of a food, compared to glucose.
The activity of the test food is deduced as a percentage of the activity of an equal amount of the reference food. A food with a GGE of 15 would impose the same blood glucose level as 15g of glucose - how much of the reference is in 100g of the food.
In this month's issue of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, Monro and colleague Eva Martinet describe a second VFC - wheat bran equivalents for faecal bulk (WBEfb).
They set out to show how an effective food product for bowel regularity could be designed from 'knowledge of the VFC content of its ingredients, but not from its dietary fibre content'.
"Whereas WBEfb expresses bulking efficiency, dietary fibre is a completely unreliable guide to the effect of fibre on the body, given that some fibres are actually destroyed by fermentation in the colon, and thus do not contribute bulk," the authors state.
Both GGE and WBEfb have significant implications for human health. The blood glucose-raising potential of a food has been linked to obesity, heart disease and cancer, and in individuals with impaired glucose tolerance, e.g. those with diabetes, to blindness and kidney failure.
And, despite its unglamorous nature, colonic bulk provides significant protection against a range of bowel disorders. Rates of colorectal cancer, (among the four most common cancers in the UK and US), soar as faecal bulk drops below 150-200 g per day.
"We now intend to build up the data so they can be used across a wider range of foods," says Monro.
He believes that despite their virtual nature, VFCs could show up the real performers among the hundreds of so-called functional foods that are currently flooding supermarket shelves.
The researcher concludes: "Once they know how responsive they are to a certain level of a VFC in one food, they can use the information to predict how other foods will affect them."