Abstract
For a long time historically, human beings have been selecting proper foods to maintain good health, such as foods having antioxidant or anti-obesity activities, and foods preventing lifestyle-related diseases. Almost all foods, selected up to now, have some special functional property, and are considered to be the big results of human wisdom. The question that arises is which property is the most informative and important? Are there any techniques that can be used to evaluate food comprehensively? Since the worst enemy of human beings is disease and it is said that almost all diseases are triggered by stress, lowering stress is considered to be very important to maintain good health. In addition, food has primary (nutritional), secondary (sensory), and tertiary (physiological) functions, and stress, in a broad sense, is a key concept in each of these three functions. Therefore, we focused on stress to evaluate foods comprehensively. We tested more than 200 foods and demonstrated that almost all of them had some degree of stress-reducing capacity. On the other hand, among stress-reducing properties of Tai Chi Quan exercises for health improvement, stomping on an uneven floor mat, smelling aromas, and ingesting food with a salivary chromogranin A level, ingesting food showed the strongest stress-reducing capacity. In ingesting food, there may be three effective ways to reduce stress, namely chewing, consuming the stress-reducing ingredients and enjoying the spices. Furthermore, we demonstrated that this stress-reducing capacity can be applied to business strategies, namely creating hit products in various fields and finding personalized foods.
