Effect of health on Nutrition/Dairy Foods and Human Nutrition

Scientific progress in nutrition, medical and food sciences is having an increasing effect on our approach towards nutrition. There had been a growing awareness about the effects that nutrition has on the health of an individual. Nutritive foods play an important role as an agent for improving health, help in disease prevention and hence maintaining the well being of an individual. Researchers suggest that health of a person depends upon three chief factors; genetic factor, exercise and nutrition. With the growing researches in food and nutrition, a new class of food known as functional foods has come into being. These functional foods are the nutritive foods that contain certain health-promoting components in addition to the traditionally occurring nutrients. Milk and other dairy products can be identified as one of these kind of functional food as it contains bioactive peptides, probiotic bacteria, antioxidants, highly absorbable calcium, conjugated linoleum acid and other biologically active components. In addition to providing nutrition to the body, these components also alleviate the health of an individual and thus help in prevention of many diseases. The following paper reviews and discusses some of the latest findings regarding the role of milk and other dairy foods in nutrition and health.