Fortified food is certainly one of the great triumphs of public-health policy. When vitamin-B-enriched flour was introduced in the 1940s, rates of pellagra plummeted. Iodine-fortified salt virtually wiped out goiter, and vitamin-D-enriched milk eliminated rickets in children. But some experts say that such carefully designed campaigns have little in common with the fortified products now turning up in supermarkets.

“Those decisions were based on rigorous public-health studies,” said Dr. Jeffrey Mechanick, a professor of endocrinology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “But the science hasn’t been done on the new nutraceutical products, and the F.D.A.’s current labeling standards are inadequate.”

The agency does not have specific rules for the labeling of functional foods. “It all depends on what type of claim is being made,” said Michael Herndon, an agency spokesman. “An unqualified health claim like ‘calcium reduces your risk of osteoporosis,’ has to be proved in advance. A more general claim like ‘X keeps your heart healthy’ has to be provable by the manufacturer, but we would not require proof in advance.” As with conventional foods, functional foods must clearly state the presence of allergens, like milk or fish, in the ingredients list.

The Food and Drug Administration does not conduct nutritional research. Several other federal agencies do so, but functional foods are not evaluated by any specific office. “Nutraceutical products have characteristics of both food and drugs,” said David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the F.D.A. “It’s easy for them to slip through the cracks, and the industry is always ahead of the agency.”

Image Credit... Lars Klove for The New York Times

The free-market policy on claims for nutraceuticals benefits companies like LycoRed, a global provider of compounds pulled out of tomatoes that grow in desert greenhouses in Israel. LycoRed, like FutureCeuticals, National Starch, the German chemical giant BASF and other companies, produces a range of additives for the food industry.

“Everybody already knows that a tomato is healthy,” said Udi Alroy, the company’s chief marketer. “We don’t have to sell something from Mars.” But the form in which the tomato appears in LycoRed products is somewhat unearthly. Specially bred tomatoes, bright red and flavorless, are pulped and then treated to extract the valuable compounds of lycopene, beta-carotene and lutein — which are then encapsulated in “beadlets” so tiny they cannot be felt by the human tongue.