Abstract
Most biologically active factors in foodstuffs exert multifunctional activities, and are able to contribute to the prevention of various diseases. In addition, some food components exert synergic effect. Combined use of such components makes it possible to decrease the dose of individual factors to obtain predictable effects. Appropriate use of such multifunctional factors enables the production of multifunctional foods with higher activity and safety, but with lower production costs. To create such multifunctional foods, extensive and cooperative studies aimed at clarifying the mechanisms responsible for interactions between food components, their absorption and transportation, and changes occurring with aging, are necessary. Since even our preliminary studies are too extensive to describe here, a brief outline of the important findings related to the action of functional lipids, antioxidants and dietary fibers is presented.
